felix

A few weeks ago, American writer Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial article in the Atlantic Monthly. In his piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he elaborated on an interesting hypothesis regarding the cognitive consequences of the web. Carr, a well-known critic of technological utopianism asked whether it could be that using the web slowly rewired people’s neuronal circuitry. He explains: For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet (…). A few… Lire la suite »How the Web Is Changing Us

Things are moving forward on the privacy front. In April, the so-called “Group 29”, an advisory body to the European Commission on privacy and public liberties matters, issued a memo in which it analyzed the activity of data-mining internet companies. More specifically, it sought to establish whether they respected the European regulatory framework which is composed of two directives: –    the data protection directive, adopted in 1995, that ranks privacy as a fundamental right and establishes a set of general principal regarding personal data protection in the European Union; –   … Lire la suite »Regulating Privacy in the Online World

This article by Elizabeth Van Couvering, from the London School of Economics, is now four years old and thus allows to put in perspective the evolution of web search engines, which have become key players of the information society. She makes a few interesting points: The author classifies search engines as media, saying that their business model is very similar to that traditional media of mass communication such as television or newspapers. They too provide content (searches), trying to attract the widest audience – or traffic – in order to… Lire la suite »The Political Economy of Internet Search Engines