David Hudson on Sun, 19 Jan 97 21:26 MET |
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nettime: BrainWave Project |
I've got mixed feelings about cutting and pasting a press release to send out over nettime, but here goes. Libertarianism in one form or another has been the topic of several recent posts, so I thought a lot of you might want to know. (Plus, a personal P.S. at the end. Thanks.) -- Contact: Bonni Hamilton (415) 977-1974 (email: bonni@salon1999.com) or Michael Kaminer (michael@mkpr.com) Frank DeLuca (frank@mkpr) (212) 627-8098 LEADING WEB SITES COLLABORATE ON BRAINWAVE PROJECT Seeking to push the boundaries of dialogue on the Internet, four leading World Wide Web sites have joined forces to explore some of the major issues confronting the Web and its relationship to society. The BrainWave Project brings together Electric Minds (www.minds.com), Feed (www.feedmag.com), Salon (www.salonmagazine.com) and The Site (www.thesite.com) on a regular basis to tackle a major issue of concern from multiple angles -- and to bring the combined intelligence and passion of each site's writers and users to bear on the issue. The BrainWave project is the first such collaboration on the Web. Each of the four participating sites already hosts its own vibrant community of conversation. As part of the project, each site will point the participants in its own conversations to the discussions on the other sites -- helping to build a larger community of critical minds in the new medium. The first BrainWave event, to be launched January 20, addresses the spreading ideology of libertarianism, the small but influential movement that values individual rights over the state and that preaches the gospel of the free market in every aspect of society. Hostile to government, fanatical about privacy and dogged in debate, libertarians have always had a disproportionate presence on the Net. Now, just as libertarians like Charles Murray emerge into the American mainstream, they are also being challenged by critics who charge them with condoning ever-greater inequalities. One of those critics, Gary Kamiya, kicks off the BrainWave conversation with an essay in Salon to be posted on Monday, Jan. 20. Simultaneously, Feed launches a "living document" in which a panel of critics annotate excerpts from Murray's new polemic ("What It Means to be a Libertarian"). Feed panelists include author Paulina Borsook, the Wall Street Journal's John Fund , MSNBC's Omar Wasow and essayist Ellen Willis. Electric Minds will feature Rewired's David Hudson as a guest columnist in Howard Rheingold's Tomorrow section, with contributors such as Robert Rossney and David Bennahum joining the discussion in the accompanying Tomorrow Conversation. On The Site, discussion is spurred as Denise Caruso provides cogent commentary, Suzanne Stefanac offers a bit of history and context, and Matthew Hawn encourages readers to decode libertarian truisms. Together, the four participating sites hope that their members will discover each other's communities and bring the exchange of ideas on the Web to a rich new level. Electric Minds is an online community focused on technology, the future and their impact on society. Feed, one of the Web's most acclaimed journals of opinion, has been called by the Wall Street Journal "the best example of combining the quality of print and principles of traditional print journalism with the new forms available online." Salon, a daily Web magazine of books, arts and ideas, was recently selected by Time magazine as Web site of the year. ZDTV's The Site is both a nightly hour-long television program on MSNBC and a lively, interactive Web site exploring how technology affects our daily lives. -- P.S. In a recent post, Hari Kunzru briefly mentioned that I sneered at him on the Rewired site. He's right. What I said was unfair. I read his first post too quickly, and hours later, the article was up. Ooops. Sorry. _________________________________________________________ David Hudson REWIRED <www.rewired.com> dwh@berlin.snafu.de Journal of a Strained Net _________________________________________________________ -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de