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An ordinary individual has no competence to act as an effective gatekeeper for the virtually infinite mass of information made available by the benevolent fool, the internet

It’s usually assumed that, as a whole, blogs form what is known as the blogosphere – William Quick, who coined the term, regarded blogs as ‘intellectual cyberspace’. The neologism meant that the blogging space and its participants created a new, online home for Reason

The naive belief and the subsequent crash were obviously related to perceiving the internet in the 1990s as a kind of technological miracle that, as if by magic, would solve humanity’s problems

The more media literacy we own, the better. Understanding media is just as important as participation in creating it, not just in terms of trying it out

The idea of ‘free culture’ stresses the notion that intellectual property laws are not just the domain of nuance-loving lawyers, but an issue that should concern all of us

Art, like a particularly vigorous strain of bacteria, can now blossom in nearly every environment. Machinima is made precisely because it CAN be made – and because there are people willing to do so

The youngest generations, used to constant feedback from the content they consume, are no longer experiencing the awe and joy that were brought on by first interactive contacts with the media

When the first 8-bit computers appeared in Poland the joystick seemed to be the most obvious delineation of the border between the work machine and the play machine

Fan creativity began with short stories, but already in the 1980s montage films, created on the basis of official, professional productions, played an important role in fandom output

If in the 20th century the amateur was basically a non-professional, in the 21st, the amateur is a fan and the term is returning to its etymological roots

In the media ecosystem, convergence introduces more chaos than order. When focused around a single device, it paradoxically provides greater choice, while at once complicating the media ecosystem

Culture 2.0 isn’t based on digital technologies only; the term doesn’t reflect a blind faith in the power of technology

Authors have predicted the demise of everything from books, television, the press, middlemen, and professional artists to politics, government, nation states, and even entire regions. But unexpected returns happen all the time

It’s obvious that the boundaries between what’s public and private are increasingly blurry

What does Linux have to do with culture?

In 1968, Roland Barthes published an essay titled ‘The Death of the Author’, in which he described the text as a multi-dimensional space, a tissue of quotes navigated by the reader

The strength of the bond between media and the past is best demonstrated by the fact that the past is essentially a product of media

Trips to remote places outside the range of communications networks and ubiquitous computing are now treated as tempting adventures

We have a strong need to experience culture together, even if we consume it separately

In these mediated times, it is hard to determine what the word ‘society’ means. Some writers, among them John Urry, claim that the social sciences will simply have to do without the term. A much simpler alternative would be to follow the network of ties and connections

The members of the Toruń underground obviously didn’t identify with hacker culture, but one would be hard pressed to find a better example of the creative use of technology in anti-systemic activity

New culture, to an even greater extent than before, is a culture of versions. And it’s not just thanks to the term ‘culture 2.0’, although the label itself is not without meaning

Folksonomy is simply another word for social tagging

The disruption of the existing system of gatekeepers, and along with it the ‘raison d’être’ of many people and companies, has made the debate on piracy more controversial today than ever before

Internet porn is a delicate subject, but let’s try to examine it from an ‘outside the box’ perspective

Public Domain Day is a celebration of great authors’ works becoming genuine public goods. How does that sound in the context of recent ACTA turmoil?

Despite the lack of a ‘liberated computer language’, software itself has a tendency to rebel against its creators, thanks to a wide variety of bugs and defects in the source code

While existing institutions of culture or the media that transmit it may disappear, culture itself is here to stay