A response to Billy on Bob’s thought experiment, part 2 April 23, 2007
Posted by mwj as atheism, christianity, existentialism, fsm, philosophy, religion, technology, youtube. add a comment.
Part two of my response to some YouTubers on the subject of existentialism and religion. The webcam is ancient but I am making a few faltering steps towards a new way of thinking about religion. Click below for the transcript.
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A response to Billy on Bob’s thought experiment, part 1
Posted by mwj as existentialism, philosophy, technology, youtube. add a comment.
Part one of some low-tech observations about existentialism in the post-human age. Follow the link for the script if you can’t bear watching my lips flap about completely disconnected to the words that are coming from them.
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Nick Gisburne and YouTube: a new context for an old debate February 14, 2007
Posted by mwj as journalism, media, philosophy, politics, technology, web2.0, youtube. 3 comments.
This is a YouTube piece that excerpted from the article below. Unfortunately, I had to record it with a stone age camera, but I got the audio with my iBook speakers, so its fine. (Link)
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The debate over religion and free speech has erupted on YouTube. Nick Gisburne, an atheist on YouTube, recently published a video entitled “Islamic Teachings: Cruelty From The Qur’an.” This video was taken down by YouTube staff, at first citing its “inappropriate nature,” and both of Gisburne’s YouTube accounts were subsequently made unavailable to the public and permanently disabled. Until other users started to publish Nick’s work on their own account, it was impossible to find any of Nick’s videos, either his attacks on Christianity and Islam, or his videos speaking in defence of himself.
I have a huge interest in this debate, and believe it is an opportunity to examine the implications of “new media” for the old discussion over the tension between religious freedom and the freedom of speech. It also shows us a darker side of Web 2.0: in a world where “social networking” is the new mechanism for determining what content we do and do not see, there is the major danger of the whole enterprise devolving into “gang warfare,” as one YouTube member has so aptly put it.
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