InfoBore 3
Here’s a rundown of recent(ish) info-related posts and articles:
Marc Tyrell reviews James Harkin’s Lost in Cyburbia: How Life on the Net Has Created a Life of Its Own.
Sam Liles reviews Cyberpower and National Security, edited byFranklin D. Kramer, Stuart H. Starr, and Larry K. Wentz.
Information causality at the physics arXiv blog – The Foundation of Reality: Information or Quantum Mechanics?
Media Violence, Aggression and Policy – Ted Castronova at Terra Nova
Tackling Terrorism in Liberal Democracies – Leila Ouardani, UKDF Defence Viewpoints
Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism – Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, CTheory.net
Virtual reality: Cyber Crime Police Station Comes Up in Mumbai – ZeeNews.com
Has Moazzam Beg really been hired to help design Rendition: Guantanamo, a new video game? [h/t Bouphonia]
What Are We? The Convergence of Self and Communications Technology – Mark Turner
From last year, Cyberskepticism: The Mind’s Firewall by Tim Thomas [pdf] [h/t Adam]
From the article on the Gitmo game:
“But no US or British soldiers get killed in it. The only ones being killed are mercenaries.”
Blackwater? Or sorry, Xe..
Xe, the “armed wing of the GOP”, as I read somewhere. Yeah, it’s all a bit weird.
Castronova does a good job of representing the ideological camp that dismisses research into the effects of exposure to violence because that research is viewed as an attempt to limit freedom of expression. Color me unimpressed.
Yup, correct. I encountered something similar a while back in the US, see here (penultimate para).
I should probably add that Castronova’s first widely-read book, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (2005), is excellent. His second one, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality (2007), is not.