GopherLink! Egyptian Law No. 100 and why it destroys press freedom. Read more here.

100 Confessions: My Five LEAST favorite books

(67) My Five LEAST favorite books:

(1) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Reason: This Pultizer-prize winning story captures the dichotomy of beauty and death. Dillard writes this in first person as she spends years recording what happens in nature If anyone cried as much as Annie Dillard in that story, they would be on anti-depressants. She could have a spiritual revelation while taking a dump.

(2) The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
Reason: imagine reading Lord of the Rings if Tolkien was an awful writer and clearly ripping off other people's material. That's The Sword of Shannara.

(3) Eragon by Christopher Paolini
Reason: this is mainly principal. If you were a young aspiring fantasy writer, what would be your wet dream? Two parents in publishing. Paolini's wet dream was real. Both his parents were in publishing, and, we get the impression, kind of helped him through the process. Once it's finished, they have easy access to speaking engagements in schools, etc. to promote the book. And on a narrative note, the only author more derivative that Christopher Paolini is Terry Brooks.

(4) Living Dead in Dallas by Charlene Harris
Reason: After writing a blockbuster first novel Dead Until Dark, Charlene Harris writes a sequel that has none of the narrative mystery, flair or even sex appeal of the first book. Someone should tell her that there are other ways to bring sex appeal to book rather than actually having a sex scene every chapter. It's like 007 became a woman...and started sleeping with vampires. The sweet, innocent girl we fell in love with in Dead Until Dark kisses at least three different guys in this one and tries every position you can imagine in this one. And ones you can't really imagine. Because they're vampires.

(5) Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Reason: I know it's a harsh thing to say about the second-most read book of all time (next to the Bible), but I really did think the book is awful. I left Pilgrim's Progress really hating Christian, the main character. And more than that, I was furious at having "Christian" represent my religion. He was an a**hole. I left the book thinking that I'd rather be left outside the castle than spend my life walking on eggshells with that dude. I know, I know. It was a different time period, but hey, so was the Bible. I can still read that and think Jesus was chill.

The Social Media Revolution

Is social media a fad? Or the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution?

Sony releases the "slim"

Sony just announced the release of their new "slim" PS3 with 120GB harddrive, less energy use and less space use.

I'm really regretting the ridiculous amount of money I spent on the 60 GB PS3. That said, it doesn't look like this will have the same reverse compatibility features of the 60 GB (which is why I got that in the first place).

It is however, cheaper than the "fat" PS3s and significantly smaller. Sony's still a contender, folks.

100 Confessions: Sad Things

(66) I like sad things. Sad music, depressing stories, mournful movies; all in a days work. My wife, the optimist who likes happy things occasionally has to sit through my media intake. Her brow furrows and she usually asks questions like, "Why do you like such depressing stuff?"

For my part, I think it's because my life's good. But I like to be reminded that it's better than other peoples. This is also why I read obituaries.

100 Confessions: Hurricanes

(65) I'm a hurricane pro. I grew in Florida. I weathered Andrews, Charlie, Frances, Jeanne, Wilma and all the ones in between. We got three or four a year and usually there was at least one every two years that really hit hard. But you have to remember "hit hard" is a relative term. There's a reason Florida houses are ugly--they're built to withstand hurricanes. We never had any real fear we'd lose our house, but we would worry about stuff falling on our cars and flooding.

For hard-hitters, we boarded up windows, gott water, ice, gas for the generator, etc. Many hit at night so you sat indoors with your family, playing monopoly by candlelight or reading books together. If they hit during the day, we would watch the wind whip around the trees and place bets on whose palm tree would crumble (never was ours).

It was actually a family and community building event. You knew that in the next day(s) you wouldn't have power, so people would empty out their freezers and throw the defrosting food on the grill. Neighbors you'd never talked to in your life suddenly became grill mates and you'd talk about the storm, the damage, etc.

It may sound crazy, but as a kid, I looked forward to them. The sheer force and magnitude of them is amazing. You get time off school. You party with people on block. Your family spends time with you that doesn't involve staring at TV screen and only talking between commercial breaks.

Review: New Media, New Politics: From Satellite Television to Internet in the Arab World

This semi-famous white-paper from 1999 confronts head-on the issues of censorship just hinted at in other publications (such as here, here, here, and here). There are three essential messages of this paper:

(1) New Media is still new and confined largely to the elite. But Internet is proliferation rapidly.
(2) Governments are struggling to exert censorship over new media.
(3) "The Internet holds the promise of allowing Arabs to dip into a vast sea of information that currently lies beyond their grasp" (Alterman xi).

Alterman could be accused of being overly optimistic that the new generation of Arabs, using New Media, will overcome any ills in their society. The internet certainly provided a great source of new information in America and many new tools for overcoming the ills in our society, but it also gave tools to pedophiles. Media is both glorious and fallen as Calvin would say.

Alterman notes the grounds for censorship in the Arab world. It is fascinating enough that I will quote it at length:

"There are generally four grounds for censorship in the Arab world today. The first has to do with the bounds of political debate. Whereas every Arab country has some degree of free debate, in each there are "red lines" that cannot be crossed. These red lines often have to do with Islamist opposition forces...The second and related taboo is criticism of a country's rulers or their families. From Morocco to Iraq, rulers may not be criticized by name in the domestic media (Alterman 46)

A famous example of the second taboo (that often results in censorship) was of the Moroccan leader Hosni Mubarak's sons. After a regional newspaper advertised an upcoming issue in which they would reveal details of the sons' personal corruption, the sons successfully sued the news organization to keep them from printing it. Then to add insult to injury, they sued the paper a second time for false advertising by promising a story they never delivered to the public (Alterman 46).

The third taboo has to do with writing of a religious nature that might cause undue dissension in a country. Islam is the majority religion in every country in the Arab world, but there remains disagreement within and between countries regarding what the proper practice of Islam requires. Within the generally acceptable bounds od discussion are debates over the nature of Islamic finance, cultural conflict with Western secularism and the role of women in the family and in the workplace. What are generally barred are discussions that seek to delegitimize Muslim groups or that incite violence against religious minorities. This is often a floating line, and it is most clearly crossed when Islamist partisans start tossing around the concepts of apostasy (ridda) or disbelief (kufr) to describe groups or individuals whose views they oppose. Whereas governments in the region often try to appropriate Islam to legitimize their own rule, they are vigilant in guarding against the possibility that some would use Islam to deligitimize either the government itself or groups in the general population (Alterman 46-47).

The third taboo is interesting because it relates so closely to the second. If the leader of your country IS your religious leader (ie. Iran), then what are you doing when you publish something that challenges that leader? Are you challenging politics or religion? In practice, it's often whichever has the worse consequences for the journalist (Doha Debates). Without separation of religion and state, a statement against a corrupt leader can be twisted easily into a statement against Islam.

The forth taboo has to do with social and sexual mores....The guiding principle seems in many ways not so much toban because of the nature of the materials themselves, but rather to ban those materials that are likely to cause (or have caused) offense among domestic clergy (Alterman 47).

But Alterman notes that censorship is perhaps a dying art. Because the internet proliferates and as literacy proliferates, people will be using the internet for information. "Censorship over the internet is ...perhaps the easiest to circumvent, becuase many of those who want to circumvent restrictions are more technically savvy than those who want to keep the restrictions in place" (Alterman 47).

Alterman predicts that transnational media is the future of Arab journalism because they can do hard-hitting reporting of multiple countries without having to answer to them. Off-shore media is large area of growth, with reporters on the ground in the Arab world, but supplying information to publications based in England and France, who are exempt from censoring laws (Alterman 73-74).