Hacktivism is in the news, if not exactly grabbing headlines. When major service providers pulled the plug on WikiLeaks, temporarily cutting off access to the site via its domain name, “WikiLeaks.org” in hopes of hobbling financial support the venture, the boys at anonymous sprung into action, unleashing their anarchic, anti-corporate rage in the form of a series of attacks on a host of websites across the globe. What does this mean,...

Prizes. At this time of year, you can’t escape them. Top ten viral videos. Best scandals of the year. The Darwin Awards. And, of course, the induction into print media’s Hall of Fame: Time‘s Man of the Year Award. This award, you’ll recall, recognizes the person who “for better or worse has most influenced events in the past year.” Like the Academy Awards, there’s a lot of build up, the pre-hype hype,...

At the end of my last post, I asked the question, “Is nothing sacred?” Here are some responses to that question, via the world of Web 2.0: After a day of denial, Gawker acknowledges that it has been hacked and that the private data of its 1.3M users have been posted to an open site for downloading by others.Meaning?If you have a Gawker account, your password is available to anyone who visits the bit-torrent site. (If you’re...

“This is not a ‘phone,’” Dr. Englander told the parents who looked, collectively, shellshocked. What you’ve given your child “is a mobile computer.” This quote comes from “As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catchup,” the latest cage-rattling piece in the Times’ ongoing coverage of technology’s disruptive influence on the family. It’s easy enough to interpret parental cluelessness of...

What better way to sum up the last couple of weeks’ meditations on the transformative powers of Web 2.0 than WikiLeaks? When Paul and I make our presentations on the future of higher education, we begin by stipulating that the dominance of digital media is not inevitable at some future time, but rather is already a fait accompli. Here’s one way to illustrate this fact: a few months back, the New York Times ran an article with a...

Two acts, side-by-side. A student at Rutgers-Camden pens an editorial calling on the administration to remove Paul Robeson’s name from the library: It is certainly not in keeping with our timeless American values, layed out over 230 years ago by our founding fathers in the Constitution, for New Jersey’s finest public university to endorse a man as unsavory as Paul Robeson. A hacker at Washington State found a way into the classroom...