Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Long time no Google...

Sometimes i am sorry i do not blog in HE or there is no (good) translation from any language to any language... I was checking papers in "New Media and Society" course, where students had to analyse verious media products about technology. One of the papers had a very intersting article about Google (the article is in HE). It followed a book by John Battelle called "The Search", which just got translated from EN to HE. Looks like an intersting reading.
Maybe i should start posting some books reviews here... hmm...

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

The boycott…

Well, it actually passed. NATFHE actually decided to boycott Israel. I don’t really know even how to react to this for frankly I didn’t believe it’ll happen. I fail to understand the logic behind the decision, which appears ignorant to me and the fact that it was done in between discussion on wages makes it even insulting. I try to imagine how it was actually done: “Now, when we finished discussing the decrease in our pension funds, let talk about boycotting Israel and then will come back to the question of our travel expenses since the gas prices have risen…” Do they really believe that this is what will change the situation? That this is what will encourage the sides to find a solution? It seems like a populist and arrogant decision by which someone probably gained some political capital. Here is this decision is counterproductive by the very least. It creates a situation where people are pushed to the ages. You are not allowed to have a sophisticated opinion (support the existence of a separation wall/fence and argue for full withdrawal from the territories for example). You have to take a stand either you are with “us” or with “them”. How useful can it be? Moreover the decision shows the deflation of words we are having around this conflict (genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, etc. are so easy to use these days and yet bear so little of the original meaning), but that’s an entire different issue for another post.

I tried following what is being in media about this and then in blogs. Of course Haarretz covered this both in HE and EN. Also Ynet had an EN publication about this. If you googled boycott in the last two day you could get the whole bunch of articles about the decision. Same goes for Technorati (only there I searched for “academic boycott Israel” – almost 30 posts in EN in the last two days). The reactions in blogs are rather predictable – there are those who only condemn the boycott or only support it (hmm… I think my own post fits this pattern too). There were more blogs who condemned it and just a few that supported it and even fewer that went into any kind of discussion on the topic (either pro or con). As always, the comments are the best part :)

Monday, May 29, 2006

Good news for bloggers…

...though not sure if it is as good for the readers.

Another article in HE Haaretz today (I am stopping with it for my subscription to the newspaper is gong to end in just two days :) told a story of Apple’s loss in a suite where they tried to force bloggers to expose their sources. The court said that it has no tools to distinguish between “legitimate” (read “mainstream and/or established”) and “non-legitimate” (read “grassroots and/or alternative”) news. Thus all the rules applied in order to protect journalistic practices should be applied to blogs as well.

Seemingly, it is a positive development strengthening the blogsphere. At the same time, I think there are question rising as to the parallels between blogging and journalism. When I am writing that, I have in mind the issue of ethical norms. While established journalists are subject to a certain set of ethical norms and rules, are the bloggers subject to same criteria? Should the be? Even when the journalists do not comply with the ethical code, there is scale to assess their activity, but is there such measurement for blogs? And again, should there be? What will stop me tomorrow from attacking a company, an institution or a person, without any basis? What will stop me from spreading lies over the blogshpere? Is there any shared code of conduct here according to which I may check if my actions are legitimate? Or anything is legitimate?

I think I’ll go to sleep on this happy note :)

Following up the boycott initiative.

Here is another article published in the EN Haaretz about the boycott issue. The writer’s position is pretty known in advance (just try googling his name), but, once again, the article proves that reading the comments is one of the more interesting things :)

Also I took a quick look at other Israeli sources covering the boycott issue. There was only one article in HE Ynet and what seems like a simple translation of it in the EN version. Interesting that the title is “Academics resist boycott of Israeli universities”, which is quite different from what Haaretz had (but to be honest, Haaretz dedicated much more attention to the issue – is it a question of how each one see its audience?).

Jerusalem post also had some coverage of the issue. Looking at the comments you cannot stop wondering what a different crowd reads the different papers (ironically, there was someone named Mike Epstein among the commenters :) Apparently the boycott was already supported by Canadian Union of Public Employees. It is a pity though the JP takes money for the archived content, for it’d be interesting to see what they wrote in the previous articles on the topic (apparently they too covered it for some time already).

I couldn’t find anything on the topic in NRG (Maariv), who has on of the most user-not-friendly websites I ever saw… also I don’t think they have an EN version too.

But the most fascinating things happens of course in the blogsphere. I searched for a string “academic boycott Israel” and got 1,079 results in English with any authority. Although there are not that many blogs dealing with the issue (look at this chart) the topic has been discussed pretty much constantly through out the year (at least one post a day I think) with some peaks (one really distinct was at the end of December last year – I wonder why was that?). However, I couldn’t find anything too fascinating there. Just the standard reference to mainstream media publications.

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Tomorrow is the vote for boycott.

Well, tomorrow, the British National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE – how do you pronounce that?) is going to vote on the boycott issue. There was an article in Haaretz on this subject, focusing on the efforts to stop the initiative.

Interestingly enough, there is a significant difference between the English and the Hebrew versions of the article. The EN one is much more ‘parve’ I would say, and in this way diminishes the complexity of this situation. For example, the HE version ends with a quote of Prof. Arik Monman from the City University of London, who is actually an activists against the boycott. He says a few things, such as: “For many members of the union the boycott is simply another aspect of leftists activity”. Then he adds that the boycott will actually be a very minor issue at the summit, since the major topic is going to be (surprise, surprise) diminution in the real values of the salaries of the association’s members.

I think quote like this puts the entire idea in a bit different proportion and yet again emphasized my initial idea that people who are actually acting for such action do not really appreciate its importance and complexity. In a way it reminds me all the early anthropologic studies when (frequently British :) researchers even didn’t leave their comfortable armchairs writing about the aborigines and the native societies from a pretty arrogant perspective (or when they did go, it still was a patronic attitude towards their subjects – because the developed world knows much better what is good for you) … History tends to repeat itself, and it is interesting to find yourself in a position of an aborigine…

Monday, May 22, 2006

Academic boycott

A few days ago I read about the renewal of an academic boycott on Israel by the British academics and I fail to follow the logic of it. Not only it attacks the sector which probably holds the most liberal views and is promoting a leftist agenda, the argumentation provided is so lousy, stereotypical and blindfolded, that it crates an obstacle by itself towards any kind of dialogue. There was an article in the Hebrew version of Haaretz today, which made me wonder, how many of those who so passionately advocate such boycott (it is already the second large scale attempt) do really understand what is going on here? Is any idea, articulated strongly enough able to carry away even the very intelligent groups of European academics without trying to go into the depth of it? Weird feeling… Still thinking about it…

First we took Ashdod, then we took Tel-Aviv…

… (and probably Neve Elan too)

Just a short remark, trying to keep the blog alive. Yesterday I discovered that the Israeli channel 10 has simultaneous voice-over translation to Russian. That was pretty weird watching it, but nevertheless interesting. Of course I run to check the leading Israeli TV channel, channel 2, and their news didn’t have any translation.

Have no idea what to do with this info yet, but I was fascinated…