Yahoo! News – World Photos – AP

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oh my… this is a new low.

ICT Policy: A Beginner’s Guide:
The handbook aims to build the capacity of interested persons to understand the issues around policy on ICT development and regulation, to grasp the policy process,and to become involved in this process.
http://www.apc.org/books/policy_handbook_EN.zip

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this could be handy…..

Working with PCs made simpler for people with severe disabilities:
Thanks to high-performance sensors, developed by the IPCA project, people with severe motor or speech disabilities can now operate a PC.
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cool….

The New Atlantis – The Age of Egocasting – Christine Rosen

TiVos and iPods will never destroy us. But our romance with technologies of personalization has partially fulfilled Krutch’s prediction. We haven’t become more like machines. We’ve made the machines more like us. In the process we are encouraging the flourishing of some of our less attractive human tendencies: for passive spectacle; for constant, escapist fantasy; for excesses of consumption. These impulses are age-old, of course, but they are now fantastically easy to satisfy. Instead of attending a bear-baiting, we can TiVo the wrestling match. From the remote control to TiVo and iPod, we have crafted technologies that are superbly capable of giving us what we want. Our pleasure at exercising control over what we hear, what we see, and what we read is not intrinsically dangerous. But an unwillingness to recognize the potential excesses of this power—egocasting, fetishization, a vast cultural impatience, and the triumph of individual choice over all critical standards—is perilous indeed.

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yes, this is a question of peril, of personalization and in the end, whether collectivity even matters in technology….