Berkman Buzz: October 24, 2013

Open access to academic research has never been a hotter topic. But it's still held back by myths and misunderstandings repeated by people who should know better. The good news is that open access has been successful enough to attract comment from beyond its circle of pioneers and experts. The bad news is that a disappointing number of policy-makers, journalists and academics opine in public without doing their homework.

Egyptian government to enable Internet connectivity in 500 busses next year: http://t.co/pd8o0bZcdY
—Nagla Rizk (@naglarzk)

If you talk about ‘metadata’, ‘big data’ and ‘Big Brother’ just as easily as you order a pizza, ethnography and anthropology are probably not your first points of reference. But the outcome of a recent encounter of ethnographer Tom Boellstorff and Edward Snowden (not IRL but IRP), is that tech policy wonks and researchers should be careful with their day to day vocabulary, as concepts carry politics of control and power.

What shall we make of the flood of images and voices coursing through the Internet, and how shall we understand it? In our minds, the details of so much material overlap and overwhelm. On the Internet, we say, our attention is getting shorter, but our memory is improving. And yet, when I turn off my wifi, take off my glasses, and confront the flicker and hum of images in my own degraded memory, I know that the Internet's recall will be as partial as my own. But, it seems to me, it will fail differently.

ICYMI, @citizenlab video short on cyber surveillance and the next billion users http://vimeo.com/77650794 #IGF2013
—Ron Diebert (@rondiebert)

When I was young, I had a newspaper route. One morning while walking and flipping the folded papers onto porches, I had a sudden realization that the road I walked along was connected to every other road. There was only the one big road, really—a single surface to comprehend a continent.

What struck me with special force, however, was the authority of time over that space. Leaning down to place a palm on the asphalt that morning, feeling its cool and the bite of its grit, I touched that single surface—and yet its remotest parts remained absolutely alienated from me by sheer walls of time. I can’t get there from here—not without time’s transforming consent.

Let me just leave this here while I go find my bucket list: http://t.co/qfASnueYik
—Andy Sellars (@andy_sellars)

In Porto Alegre, the capital of southernmost Brazilian state Rio Grande do Sul, the month of October began with police executing a search warrant on a cultural center and an urban settlement and seizing activists' books and computers.

In the early morning of October 4, 2013, a month that has become traditional in the calendar of national social movements, the Civil Police searched the two private residences as part of an ongoing investigation, which began in June, looking to identify “those responsible for the violent acts that have occurred at protests.”