Prodi: “Se non cambia, l’Europa potrebbe scomparire”

Il professore alla London School of Economics parla del ruolo della UE fra Cina e Stati Uniti

Senza cambiamenti strutturali “l’Europa potrebbe scomparire” dallo scacchiere mondiale, schiacciata dalla supremazia di Cina e Stati Uniti. È la sconfortante previsione tracciata da Romano Prodi durante un incontro alla London School of Economics giovedì 2 giugno 2011. Come l’Italia del Rinascimento, a causa delle lacerazioni interne, è passata da paese più avanzato al mondo a pedina marginale a livello internazionale, così, secondo l’ex presidente della Commissione europea, l’Europa potrebbe fare la stessa fine. “Nonostante sia prima al mondo per PIL ed esportazioni, l’Europa è inesistente nella battaglia per la leadership mondiale”, ha detto il professore di fronte a una folta platea di studenti e professori.

Tornato fra quelle stesse mura dove quasi cinquant’anni è stato studente, Prodi ha tracciato una visione dell’Unione europea a tinte fosche, dove a fare da padrone è “l’ansia di continue elezioni” che impedisce di prendere decisioni oltre il breve termine. A differenza del cancelliere Kohl, che scelse di abbandonare il marco per passare all’euro contro la volontà della maggioranza dei tedeschi, oggi “non ci sono più politici che vogliono rischiare la propria carriera prendendo decisioni impopolari”. Tutto questo rischia di condurre alla “fine della politica” o a quella che il professore chiama “democrazia barometrica”, dove sono i sondaggi d’opinione a dettare le scelte fondamentali.

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Privacy and freedom of speech under Google’s Big Tent

The application of privacy laws on the Internet has sparked a heated debate between the media and regulators in the UK. While every day new details emerge from the News of the World phone hacking scandal, on 20 May a report by top judges called for a change in the use of ‘super-injunctions’ – a particular kind of injunction which prevents journalists from publishing information about the applicant. On the same day, the UK high court granted a search order against Twitter because of its online users’ repeated attempts to reveal the identity of a famous footballer hiding behind a privacy injunction. A case that, according to The Guardian, made lord chief justice Lord Judge say that “modern technology was totally out of control”…

Read the entire entry on www.medialaws.eu

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We are all authors online, and cannot be forgotten

Should there be a specific “right to be forgotten” in the era of social media or do we just need a stronger right to privacy? Can content published on Facebook or Twitter be considered public, and how can private data published on these platforms be used in other contexts? Experts’ viewpoints on these issues are still contrasting. As a Westminster Media Forum entitled “Social media, online privacy and the ‘right to be forgotten’” showed, while Europe is moving towards a stronger set of rules, some UK experts support a more liberal law framework…

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The rise of Murdoch’s empire

Two articles published on the LSE Media Policy Blog and medialaws.eu, as News Corp’s bid for fully acquire BSkyB is about to be cleared by the UK Culture Secretary.

1. The challenge of measuring media plurality: Expert workshop at the LSE
LSE Media Policy Project
– 07/03/11

If News Corp’s decision to spin-off Sky News – paving the way towards the complete acquisition of BSkyB – had been announced before the expert workshop held at the LSE on 2 March, the key questions of the debate would likely have remained the same. Whether or not the deal will be approved, the problem of defining and measuring media plurality is still extremely challenging. The question of how to define and measure media plurality is far from reaching consensus, especially between experts and policy makers…
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2. The rise of Murdoch’s empire in the UK
Medialaws.eu – 08/03/11

News Corporation’s bid to fully acquire British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) will be given the green light by the UK Government. On 3 March, Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, said he believes that the undertakings from News Corp “will address concerns about media plurality”, thus paving the way towards the merger…
Read the entire entry…

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Assessing media power

Watching TV, browsing the Internet, reading newspapers and making phone calls with a single device is not the future anymore. Digitalisation of information has been leading to a convergence era, where traditional boundaries between media sectors have blurred. As the current UK case of News Corporation’s bid for full control of British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) shows, regulating the media market on the ground of pluralism of information has become a tough task.

Several UK institutions – the Government, Ofcom (the independent regulator for communications industries), and, perhaps within a few days, the Competition Commission – in addition to the European Commission, are playing a key role in a case that will reshape future UK media policies.

Read the entire entry on medialaws.eu…

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Clouds over media plurality

Once again, talking about media plurality inevitably means talking about Rupert Murdoch. Since News Corp announced its intention of totally acquiring BSkyB in June, the UK media have been in upheaval.

The key question to which the EU Commission, OFCOM and Vincent Cable (the Secretary of State for Business) are supposed to give an answer in the next weeks, is whether this deal will reduce the pluralism of information in the UK. It is a tough job, due to the difficulty to practically measure a broad concept like “pluralism”, that is not simply a synonym of diversity in ownership.

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Social media fra interazioni e contraddizioni

Attivismo online, cyber-balcanizzazione e nuove relazioni sociali. Il punto di vista di Aleks Krotoski

Basta un click su “mi piace”, seduti comodamente in poltrona, ed ecco che Facebook ci aiuta ad assolvere il compito con la nostra coscienza: ora anche noi sosteniamo la ricostruzione del Pakistan alluvionato, gli aiuti ai senza tetto di Haiti o la causa dei profughi del Darfur. Siamo improvvisamente diventati tutti più impegnati nell’era dei social network o si tratta soltanto di pigrizia e superficialità?

Secondo Aleks Krotoski, giornalista inglese esperta di tecnologia e comunicazione, la risposta, tutt’altro che univoca, sta nelle contraddizioni insite nello sviluppo del web. Nel corso del primo di una serie di incontri sul ruolo dei media organizzati da Polis (think-tank inglese nato dall’iniziativa congiunta della London School of Economics e il London College of Communication), Krotoski si sofferma sull’impatto delle relazioni create attraverso i social network sulla nostra vita quotidiana.

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Se Twitter non fa la rivoluzione

Secondo Malcolm Gladwell i social media promuovono un attivismo pigro e rafforzano l’ordine sociale

Gli strumenti dei social media non sono in grado di stimolare cambiamenti radicali, ma, al contrario, “sono ben adatti a rendere più efficiente l’ordine sociale esistente”. È questa sostanzialmente la tesi sostenuta dallo scrittore Malcom Gladwell nel suo ultimo articolo sul New Yorker del 4 ottobre. Un punto di vista atipico che ha già sollevato un ampio dibattito fra i sostenitori dei social media.

Lo scrittore americano prende come spunto il movimento per l’affermazione dei diritti degli afroamericani nei primi anni Sessanta negli Stati Uniti. Citando l’esempio dei primi sit-in nell’università di Greensboro in North Carolina, Gladwell sostiene che dimostrazioni di questo tipo, in cui gli attivisti corrono seri rischi in prima persona, non sarebbero possibili oggi attraverso, ad esempio, Twitter.

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Why I write

There’s no better way to start a blog by making George Orwell’s words mine:

I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm
(iii) Historical impulse
(iv) Political purpose

I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

George Orwell, Why I write, 1946

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