Monthly Archives: July 2007
Review of “A cosmopolitan perspective on the global economic order” by Thoman Pogge
Pogge’s general assertion is that the West’s influence in shaping the existing global social conditions is continuing to promote a monumental level of suffering that has, and continues to, kill more people than either Hitler or Stalin. While these claims … Continue reading
Copyfraud, the Corporation, and College Publishing
This posting is motivated by Jason Mazzone’s paper “Copyfraud“, where he investigates copyfraud. Copyfraud is defined as “claiming falsely a copyright in a public domain work” (3) and after discussing instances that copyfraud is both perpetrated he reflects on ways … Continue reading
“Blogging Democracy: The contribution of political blogs to democracy” by Gareth Lewis
The essay that I am discussing was one of the two that won The Dalton Camp Award this year. You can read the full version of the essay at the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting website.
Generally, Lewis’s argument can be summed up in his line “thanks to weblogs, any civic-minded citizen with a computer, a modem and the moxie to express their opinions can contribute to the media and the public dialogue.” Blogs provide a way for citizens to break through the increasing corporate control of media outlets – only 1% of newspapers are independently owned today,and in this environment blogs provide a way of expanding the number of news sources because its low cost of entry. Free services such as Blogger and Livejournal, where all of the hard work is done by a company behind the scenes, are perfect for citizen-journalists to quickly begin publishing.
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Ultimately Lewis’ arguments are a good start towards looking that the benefits of blogging, but his failure (or unwillingness given the award this essay was written for) to genuinely examine the conglomeration of mass media institutions, compression of citizen and consumer, and perception of blogs as just a new way of keeping news organizations honest, fails to identify or suggest solutions to the larger issues surrounding the mass media as it exists today.
“Principles of cosmopolitan order” by David Held
Cosmopolitanism, broadly speaking, reflects on ethical, cultural, and political issues from the position that states and political communities are not the exclusive centers of political order or force. Held begins his article in Brock’s and Brighouse’s The Political Philosophy of … Continue reading
