mstem

Recent blog posts by mstem

Lawrence Lessig Needs Your Help Awakening a Sleeping Giant

Lawrence Lessig sees the American people, enthroned as sovereign of the nation by the United States Constitution, as a sleeping giant. It's OK to sleep; in general, we'd all rather focus on things other than politics. But there are times when our political system is so broken, we must awaken and flex the powers granted to us by our Constitution. Lessig argues that now is one of those times.

Republic, Lost

What goes into, comes out of my brain?

Last Wednesday, immediately prior to attending an event on media diets, we presented a week's compilation of our own media diets. The day's scheduled events were rather meta with regards to conscious information consumption, and this turned out to be, in many ways, a theme of my diet.

Not counting this assignment, other meta media experiences included:

Freed From Pop-Up Ads, Can the Boston Globe Succeed Online?

Today's Civic lunch featured the digital team from the Boston Globe, led by Jeff Moriarty, VP of Digital Products. He was joined by Chris Marstall, Marck Chang, and Grace Woo. They've just launched a new standalone site for the Globe, spinning off from the Boston.com portal and its ubiquitous popup ads. It's not a redesign -- they got to design a newspaper site from scratch in the year 2011, and the benefits of having a blank slate are evident in their award-winning design (here's more background on that design from some of its designers).

Globe Banner

The Front Line of the US Censorship Battle is Behind Bars

In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, Editor and Cofounder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN.

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