James Gleick: The Information. A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011)

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011
ISBN 0375423729, 9780375423727
496 pages

review (Freeman Dyson, NY Books)

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Timothy Vollmer: State of Play: Public Sector Information in the United States (2011)

This topic report examines the background of public sector information (PSI) policy and re-use in the United States, describing the federal, state and local government PSI environments. It explores the impact of these differences against the European framework, especially in relation to economic effects of open access to particular types of PSI, such as weather data. The report also discuss recent developments in the United States relating to PSI re-use, such as Data.gov, the NIH Public Access Policy, and new open licensing requirements for government funded educational resources.

Publisher: European Public Sector Information Platform, Feb 2011
Series: Topic Report, no. 25
Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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VideoChronic: Video Activism and Video Distribution in Indonesia (2009)

VideoChronic publication is the result of a collaborative research project charting how activists are engaging with video technologies in Indonesia, addressing some of the issues of technology-mediated social movements, and exploring the potential and limitations of online video distribution.

The past decade in Indonesia has seen a dramatic increase in the use of video as a social change tool by community, campaign and activist organisations. Access to the tools for producing video have become increasingly democratised over this period, and rapidly adopted. Since the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime, space has been opened up for a host of new media projects to emerge. Individuals and organisations dealing with issues such as the environment, human rights, queer and gender issues, cultural pluralism, militarism, poverty, labour rights, globalisation and more have embraced video as a tool to communicate with both their bases and new audiences.

What groups are currently active in producing social and environmental video in the archipelago? What are the histories of that work? How is it currently being distributed? How are activists thinking they might approach distribution in the future?

Key researchers: Ferdiansyah Thajib M.A. and Nuraini Juliastuti M.Sc.
Project Manager & Editor: Andrew Lowenthal
Publisher: KUNCI Cultural Studies Center and EngageMedia, Nov 2009
ISBN: 978-0-646-52000-1
140 pages
Licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike 2.5 Australia

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