[PD] [PD-announce] Piksel video report: Sonification of IT censorship technologies

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, João Pais wrote:

> Predicting some critiques, someone can say "with the IPs I don't know 
> what are the sites", but they don't really have to know. It should be 
> enough to get an idea of the quantity of manipulated sites,

The number of blocked sites isn't meaningful : a one-page, one-topic site 
might count just as much as a million-page site that took a million more 
man-hours to write (think wikipedia). And then there is the relevance of 
those pages to each person.

There are many sites that we wouldn't mind getting blocked, and sometimes 
sites that we may believe ought to be blocked, but the problem is more 
about the criteria being used. If my government were to specifically only 
block IPs of the foreign sites that are used for the purpose of massive 
banking fraud in my country, I'd agree, and I'm sure that this would get 
massive support. OTOH, freedom of speech also gets massive support, but 
making a website faking a famous bank isn't considered Speech in that 
sense.

Censorship itself is easy to justify, but what can be censored, and how we 
decide what to censor, and what we reveal about the decision process, are 
the big questions.

> if you have a clear process/concept that gives it's identity to the 
> project, it's a bit of a pity that the final result looses power because 
> there isn't a strong enough "palpable" (whatever that is) connection. 
> Going too far with the "palpability" could result in a "technical 
> demonstration", but letting things too loose means that you're not 
> expressing anything at all,

Do you think that increasing palpability, by itself, causes something to 
look like a technical demonstration ? And do you think that technical 
demonstration, in itself, isn't able to be expressive ?

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| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC