Kool DJ Herc and the future of hacked media

Celebrating the arrival of page proofs of the book, this snippet comes from a section that describes the future of ‘extruded media’…

A digital media boom is underway in which assertive audiences are beginning to use and extrude media rather than watch it. To understand the nature of the coming global media boom, reflect on the birth of break beat hip-hop music.  In the early 1970s a high-rise apartment building on 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in New York’s Bronx became the birthplace of a new culture, and a new style of editing and adapting music. Clive Campbell, aka ‘Kool dj Herc’, a Jamaican-born resident, began playing records at events in and around the building.

Internet is Fecund but Hazardous (PhD –> the gyst)

The new book, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, is due in September 010. While I’m waiting for that I’ve been wrapping up my PhD work. And I think I now have answers – at least, almost final answers. Or at least some pre-almost-final answers.

Since 2005 various Governments of EU Member States have been increasingly concerned about the Internet and its role in the radicalisation of young Europeans to adopt violent ideologies associated with al Qaeda. Although we do not appear to have definitive information on the Internet’s importance in this phenomenon, concern at the political level has at times grown so severe that censorship has been loudly mooted[and argued against], and even rolled out in some countries. So, officialdom is concerned. The problem is that there is entirely too little data available on the Internet’s role. Nor is there useful data on how violent radical ideas spread on the Internet. This is the gap into which my PhD fits.