:: Media Times Review Blog ::

A historian points out the problems behind today’s claims of cultural ownership over historical artefacts.

by David Lowenthal, Spiked Online

Heritage is in demand. Ever more of the world’s heritage is looted, destroyed, mutilated, shorn of context, hidden from scrutiny, auctioned on eBay. Why? Partly because its virtuous stewards treat nations and tribes as enduring entities with sacred rights to time-honoured legacies.

Heritage is piously declared the legacy of all humanity. But the possessive jealousies of particular claimants pose huge obstacles to our global common inheritance. Confining possession to some while excluding others is the raison d’être of most heritage. Created to generate and protect group interests, it benefits us mainly if withheld from others (1).

By Theodore Dalrymple, Times Online

French students should go back to class to learn some economics

THE SIGHT OF MILLIONS of Frenchmen, predominantly young, demonstrating in deep sympathy and solidarity with themselves, is one that will cause amusement and satisfaction on the English side of the Channel. Everyone enjoys the troubles of his neighbours. And at least our public service strikers just stay away from work, and spend the day peacefully performing the rites of their religion, DIY, and not making a terrible nuisance of themselves. In fact, many of them are probably less of a public nuisance if they stay at home than if they go to work.

By Jason Cowley, New Statesman

Where are the great men and women who are changing the world for the better? Who are they? The New Statesman invites you, the reader, to nominate your modern hero. Over the next few weeks some familiar names will give their thoughts, while Jason Cowley explains what our search is all about. Ultimately, however, it’s up to you, so get voting . . .

by Dan Knauss, The New Pantagruel

From the standpoint of postmodernist thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard, western cultures universalize assumptions about what is “human” and “rational,” as if these concepts are not culturally and historically specific, the malleable products of power and ideology. According to Lyotard and others, in the hands of science and the modern state, idealizations of human autonomy and rationality have become parts of an oppressive and imperialistic apparatus. They support a “grand narrative” (or “metanarrative”) about the nature and direction of humanity and history which justifies violence and injustice carried out against marginal groups that do not conform to the beliefs and values that inform western notions of truth, justice or freedom.

By Bill Thompson, BBC News

The hardware punks at Apple have changed the world more than the Sex Pistols, argues technology commentator and Mac user Bill Thompson.

Back in 1976, the Sex Pistols were playing their first gigs, and Joe Strummer went off to form The Clash after playing support to them.

At the same time, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne set up a company to sell the Apple I computers they were building by hand in a garage.

Ronald Wayne, the forgotten “third founder”, did not think the company was going anywhere and sold out after a few months.

by Göran Rosenberg, Dagens Nyheter

The formal laws constituting freedom of expression in democratic societies are only the tip of the iceberg of unwritten agreements between citizens about what they can express publicly in one context or another, says Göran Rosenberg. These agreements differ from society to society: in the case of Denmark, the agreement to allow expressions of anti-Muslim prejudice has served to produce conflict instead of dealing with it. With communications technology enabling the proliferation of parallel public spheres, the need for common agreements on freedom of expression are all the more necessary if conflicts such as the latest controversy over the Mohammed cartoons are not to intensify.

By Dan Gillmor, BBC News

It is not an impact on the epic scale of an asteroid smashing into the Earth and killing off the dinosaurs, but the collision of technology and media is having profound effects on a more modern ecosystem.

Media are becoming democratised, and a global conversation is emerging.

The tools of production - used to create digital content such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, discussions, multiplayer games, mashups (I’ll describe each of those in more detail below) - are increasingly powerful and easy to use, yet decreasingly expensive.

Peter Drucker: the one management thinker every educated person should read

From The Economist print edition

On November 11th, a few days short of his 96th birthday, Peter Drucker died. The most important management thinker of the past century, he wrote about 40 books (the last, “The Effective Executive in Action” will be published in January) and thousands of articles. He was a guru to the world’s corporate elite, not just in his native Europe and his adoptive America, but also in Japan and the developing world (one devoted South Korean businessman even changed his first name to Mr Drucker). And he never rested in his mission to persuade the world that management matters—that, in his own rather portentous formula, “Management is the organ of institutions…the organ that converts a mob into an organisation, and human efforts into performance.”

By Adam L. Penenberg, Slate

Don’t listen to Bill Gates. The open-source movement isn’t communism.

This month, SAP’s Shai Agassi referred to open-source software as “intellectual property socialism.” In January, Bill Gates suggested that free-software developers are communists. A few years earlier, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux “a cancer.” Considering what these guys say in public, I wonder what dark words they utter in private—that al-Qaida uses open-source software to plot terrorist attacks?

The Wachowski Brothers FAQ, Wired

By Mark Miller

They may be famously untalkative, but Larry and Andy Wachowski sure know how to generate a lot of noise. With the November 5 release of The Matrix Revolutions, the final film in the epic trilogy, the media hype is once again deafening. The movies have transformed the brothers from small-time carpenters to fabulously wealthy and powerful Hollywood players. What hasn’t changed is their reticence. If anything, the Wachowski brothers have become more reclusive since the first Matrix came out in 1999. They haven’t given an interview in four years, and under an unusual deal with Warner Bros., they never have to talk to the press. Anyone who works on a film with them is made to sign a nondisclosure agreement. “They just want to stay as incognito as possible,” says their manager, Lawrence Mattis. When I told him I was writing a story, he chuckled: “Good luck going down the rabbit hole. There’s no map.”