Archives for Internet

Notes from the Electronic Cottage 7/22/10

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Do you use the Internet a good bit? If so, you’re not alone – North American adults spend about 20 hours a week on the Internet. We all know that might not be the best thing for our waistlines but what about for our brains? Does Internet use affect our physical brains? Nicholas Carr, in his new book “TheShallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” takes a look at that question, and so do we in this edition.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 6/25/09

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Technology has played an important role in the protests about the recent election in Iran – both for good and for ill. The Internet allowed protesters to communicate after the Iranian government effectively took control of the mass media. Deep packet inspection technology also allowed the Iranian government to monitor protesters emails and help identify those who were communicating via the Internet and what they were saying. The monitoring technology was supplied by western companies – who also supplied the same technologies to western governments, including the U.S., who are using it in much the same way the Iranian government is. Interestingly, the language we use to describe that activity is quite different depending on who is doing the monitoring.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 4/09/09

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

During this last month of WERU’s 20th Anniversary year, we’re digging a few old editions from the Electronic Cottage vault that seem to us to be just as relevant today as they were when they were first broadcast. In this edition from November 2004, we take a look at spam, the scourge of the Internet.
Everything in this years old edition is still true today, except one point.
The one exception is that spam is no longer just 40% of Internet email traffic. Estimates in April 2009 are that it comprises as much as 94% of Internet traffic. It seems that in some parts of the digital world, just as in the physical world, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 6/12/08

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Topic: These days, we hear that the Internet is killing libraries. That would be a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of Mainers who find that today’s libraries are both “brick” and “click,” both physical spaces and gateways to the cyber world of information, including information we would have to pay for if we tried to access it ourselves.

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