Rupert Murdoch wants to buy the Wall Street Journal

I wonder why tycoon who runs the planet's biggest communications empire would want to own the medium by which many people get their business news...

Postmodernism

Postmodernism says that these days the typical sign does not have the pattern

Signifier --> signified

but

Signifier ---> another signifier

In other words, signs relate to each other, not to reality. Baudrillard extends this to say that what we experience as the world is a web of signs, not reality but a simulacrum of reality.

The movie The Matrix turns Baudrillard's idea into a sci-fi parable.

This video re-enacts The Matrix with Muppets.

But instead of being actual Muppets (in the cloth-flesh, as it were) they are computer animations.

So this is an animation representing Muppets representing a film representing a theory representing a relationship between signs.

And if you know anything more postmodern than that, please let me know.

The power of the image

An article in today's Sunday Telegraph says that Hitler used to have a large moustache, but was ordered to clip it so that his gas mask would fit properly, when he was a soldier in the First World War.

Question: Could he still have become Der Fuhrer if he'd still looked like the first photo?

Internet killed the video store?

A chatty article about the impact that film downloads will have on Blockbuster, etc. Raises good points about the hired video typically being a shared, social experience, while the internet download will be more solitary and isolating. (A point to use if you're thinking about social effects of new technology?)

Is there a difference between comedy and terrorism?

If there is, the Pope can't see it (and he's infallible).

Cruelty to Chickens

Scenes showing women kissing the devil's bottom... Sadistic violence... Cruelty to chickens...
An article about reasons why films have been banned over the years.

World Press Freedom Day

Index on Censorship marks World Press Freedom Day with a reminder of journalists persecuted and murdered in various parts of the world.
Of the Internet it says:

Meanwhile, the hope for freedom offered by the World Wide Web seems to be lost.
Only a few years ago, we convinced ourselves that the web was the wild frontier, an ungoverned new world where everyone with access to a computer could write their own news, challenge official lines, and generally push ever harder at the barriers of censorship.

So what happened?

It seems increasingly obvious that that breach in the fence was only temporary. Throughout the world, the enforcers have caught up with the bloggers. We imagined the Internet to be beyond the reach of the censors. We were wrong. As George Orwell wrote in 1943, “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom — that is the idea, more or less.”

We now realise that this is just as true of the Internet user in 2007 as it was of the dissident diarist in 1943. In Egypt, blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman was jailed for criticising his country and Islam on his blog. Other Egyptian bloggers have quit, after harassment from security forces. Meanwhile, Iran and China both exercise extensive and ever-widening Internet censorship, with the help of companies such as Google. The Iranian government’s paranoia about the World Wide Web has now stretched to the point where sms messages may be screened, lest they be used for blogging. The Internet once offered the promise of a new ‘citizen journalism’ unburdened by commercial or institutional pressure. But now it increasingly finds itself under the insidious hand of the state censor.