Monthly Archives: March 2009

Signez le Pacte des Libertés Numériques contre la Hadopi

(Pour un complément d’information, lisez ce billet (eng))

Vous avez déjà échangé des œuvres? Vous avez déjà téléchargé des films, des tubes, mais aussi des œuvres rares, oubliées ou tombées dans le domaine public? Si tel est le cas, la loi Hadopi va bientôt faire de vous un PIRATE.

Mais si, comme nous, et comme des millions d’autres citoyens en France, vous pensez qu’il est grand temps de reconnaître ces pratiques d’échange comme inscrites dans la révolution numérique, si vous partagez la conviction qu’Internet nous offre de nouveaux espaces de liberté, et qu’il faut les protéger, nous vous invitons à découvrir et signer le Pacte pour les Libertés numériques en cliquant ici : http://reseaudespirates.net/

Pourquoi signer dès aujourd’hui et rejoindre la communauté des pirates? Parce que, dans moins de 4 jours, le débat sur la loi Création & Internet (Hadopi) reprend à l’Assemblée. Le Pacte totalise à ce jour 8000 signatures. Nous pouvons faire mieux, et atteindre 100 000 signataires dans le week-end! Cliquez ici : http://reseaudespirates.net/?q=/user/register

Au delà de l’actualité de la loi Hadopi, l’ambition du Pacte est de faire des libertés numériques un élément clé de la campagne des élections européennes de juin prochain… et, plus largement, du débat public, comme Nicolas Hulot l’avait fait pour l’écologie.

Défendons les libertés numériques : prenez le parti des pirates! http://reseaudespirates.net/?q=/user/register

Le réseau des pirates

Ils nous soutiennent : Lepost.fr, Numerama, L’hebdomadaire Vendredi, Agoravox.

Et de nombreux signataires, visibles sur le site.

Hidden track #2: Cartoon philosopher fustigates reductionism

It’s a sad, sad world, one where we have to rely on Richard Linklater’s innocuous films to express unpopular opinions. Like for instance this one:

“Believing that biology and physics can explain all of human behavior is nothing short of a reductionistic fallacy, as they do not take into account culture, individual choices – and ultimately free will”.

But don’t take my word for it. Here is a short excerpt from Linklater’s movie Waking Life (2001), where philosopher David Sosa (University of Texas, Austin) discusses determinism in a…ehm, cartoon interview.

Séminaire sur la blogosphère politique française (Paris Dauphine , 30 mars 2009) (fr) (eng)

Dans le cadre du séminaire “Réseaux et régulation”

Jean-Philippe Cointet, CREA (Ecole Polytechnique/cnrs) et TSV (inra)
Dynamiques socio-sémantiques au sein de la blogosphère politique française
Lundi 30 mars 2009, 16h – 18h
Université Paris-Dauphine (salle A 701)
Place du Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny, 75016 Paris

En guise de hors d’oeuvre, essayez cette présentation, donnée au Santa Fe Institute en 2007.

frenchblogosphere

 J-P Cointet, C Roth, E Faure “Opinion dynamics in the french political blogosphere” Scaling in Biological and Social Networks, SFI – Santa Fe, NM, USA – July 2007

 

SIANA 2009 – Semaine Internationale des Arts Numériques et Alternatifs

Du 23 au 28 Mars 2009
Evry – Ile de France

SIANA 2009
L’imaginaire des technologies numériques

23 – 28 mars 2009 Evry – France
29 juin – 4 juillet 2009, Belo Horizonte – Brésil
du 5 au 12 octobre 2009 , Nanchang (Jangxi) – Chine

http://www.siana-evry.fr/

TELECOM & Management SudParis (Organisme d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche en TIC et management), en collaboration avec le Théâtre de l’Agora – scène nationale d’Evry et de l’Essonne – et la ville d’Evry, organise la troisième Semaine Internationale des Arts Numériques et Alternatifs (SIANA).

siana

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March 28th 2008 is Download day: Opposition to French anti-piracy law rises

I dream of a cultural market that includes its customers, instead of suing them.

So far, I have published a couple of books and a certain amount of articles and book chapters: a fair share of them have been put online for readers to download them for free. I didn’t do it, “pirates” did. Well, sometimes Google Books did it, but pirates benefited from it, I guess… Point is: I thank them, because that helped my books being republished and made my articles known to a wider audience.

Just my two cents, but I believe people who freely download online contents are not stealing it. On the contrary, by sharing it within their communities, they are actively adding value to the creative process. I write books. Readers read it. So-called Internet pirates promote, distribute, link, localise, remix, comment and catalogue them. That’s a heck of a job. A job they are not paid for. Ironically, they pay for sharing: they pay hardware and they contribute their time, their disk space and their technical competences.

Given that, I’m all the more insulted by the anti-piracy bill recently proposed by French Minister for Culture and Communication, Christine Albanel.

geekpiracy

Should this law pass, Internet users caught “illegally” sharing contents would have their Internet access cut out for one year (plus face fines and other legal ramifications). Backed by record industry and cinema lobbies, this law is not only politically reactionary – it is technically unfeasible. If only French lawmakers had heard about public internet access, wi-fi, cybercafés, cloud computing –  they would know “individual” Internet access is just about as individual as the wall socket one plugs a washing machine in. You bar it off, I can simply go somewhere else.

Consumer associations and Internet access providers have produced a number of other compelling arguments against this law. My only argument is:

Present legislation on so-called intellectual property protection on the Web mimics past century’s legislation on private property. Users downloading mp3, films, software are equated to petty thieves stealing apples, cars, money. But a car and an mp3 file are not the same kind of product. Technically, the former is a rivalrous good, while the latter is a non-rivalrous one. If I’m driving a car, nobody else can at the same time. If I listen to an mp3, anybody else can at that same time. In the first case, we can talk about stealing. In the second case, we should talk about sharing. From a legal and economic point of view, online contents are more similar to public goods than to private ones. Downloading online contents is nothing like driving a car: it is more like riding a bus. The French government is doing something as ridiculous as forbidding public transportation.

This is why I invite you to take part to the Download day that will take place all around France on Sat, March 28th, 2009. The rationale is explained here, and here is the twitter providing directions and details about the venues.

—a

Seminal book on the geography of Internet now available online

Coined in 1984 by William Gibson, the term cyberspace was the buzzword of the 1990s. In those dark ages, way way way before Google maps and geotagging, academic conventional wisdom tended to regard information environments as a space apart, the Other Plane, a habitat of pure information – a “cybernetic space”. Ludicrous, right? Yet, a number of prominent scholars have produced excellent research on the topic, mainly in the fields of cultural studies, media studies, and humanities. So, it was a bit of a surprise when, at the very end of the decade, geographers Martin Dodge & Rob Kitchin, came up with a thought-provoking book called Mapping Cyberspace (2000).

A 3D hyperbolic topology of the Internet (circa 2001)
A 3D hyperbolic topology of the Internet (circa 2001)

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Mon séminaire EHESS : la rumeur et le corps dans la culture du numérique

LES VENDREDIS DU CENTRE EDGAR MORIN
Vendredi 20 mars 2009
EHESS, 105 bd Raspail, Paris 6è

 

De 13h à 15h – Salle 2  – Séminaire “Pratiquer la transdisciplinarité dans la discipline : théorie et méthodes”
La rumeur : un objet transdisciplinaire
Intervenant : Pascal Froissart, maître de conférence en Sciences de l’information et de la communication, Université Paris 8

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De 15h à 16h – Salle 10 – Séminaire du Centre Edgar Morin (sociologie, anthropologie, histoire)
Mini-séance de présentation du nouveau numéro de la revue Esprit contenant les dossiers Le corps à l’épreuve des cultures numériques et Homo numéricus coordonnés par Antonio Casilli (Centre Edgar Morin) et Marc-Olivier Padis (Revue Esprit).

 

Centre Edgar Morin. Equipe de l’Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain (IIAC)
EHESS – CNRS
22 rue d’Athènes, 75009 Paris, France
Tél.   33 (0)1 40 82 75 25 – Fax  33 (0)1 40 82 75 40

cetsah@ehess.fr  –  http://www.iiac.cnrs.fr/cetsah

Dans la revue Esprit mon dossier sur "Le corps dans la culture du numérique"

La dernière livraison de la revue Esprit (mars 2009), est entièrement consacrée aux impacts sociaux d’Internet. Elle contient le dossier Le corps à l’épreuve des cultures numériques que j’ai coordonné.
lampeduza

Flotando - by Lampeduza (c) Creative Commons

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Social Network Analysis for beginners

In the last few decades, Social Network Analysis (SNA) has established itself as one of the essential tools for sociology. And computer science. And medicine and management and economics and so on. Now, it is a fact that NOT everyone among my friends and colleagues is aware of what the hell SNA is about and how it can come handy when studying social phenomena. Instead of suggesting the canonical readings (Granovetter, Wellman, White, etc.), I’ve been looking for a satisfactory and comprehensive online SNA tutorial. The closest I’ve come to that is:

View more presentations from Hendrik Speck. (tags: xing web)

Just skip the introductory part about Myspace and Avril Lavigne. I mean, the man wrote it in 2007, so the first 18 slides have that spooky scent of an afternoon nostalgia television show… Go straight to part 2 and you will find that, though longish, the presentation is quite educational. Also, it has a few wicked social graphs. Hope that’s useful.

—a

Powerpoint de mon séminaire sur corps, MMORPG, médecine et réseaux sociaux (Paris Descartes)

Pour ceux qui l’avaient demandée, voilà la présentation powerpoint de mon intervention du 3 mars 2009 à la Faculté de Médecine de l’Université Paris Descartes.  Vous pouvez la télécharger en cliquant sur l’image.

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