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Welcome to Eszter's Weblog Here you will find my thoughts and comments about all sorts of things from sociology, the Internet, academia, teaching, research, books and movies to current events, fun Web stuff, art, gadgets and just about anything else that comes to mind. If the inspiration strikes you during your visit, feel free to leave a note via the comments link.

[Previous entry: "Too old for the candles"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Best of E-LIST?"] "Public use of wireless and the military - a century later" 12/17/2002 Entry Ed points to a piece in the New York Times about the concerns regarding how public use of wireless Internet access may interfere with military communication. This piece reminds me of the paper I wrote a few years ago on "Radio's Lessons for the Internet" [link points to pdf file]. The overall goal of my paper was to point out that the Internet is not a complete free-for-all, rather, government policies - among other factors - influence how it develops and diffuses. In that paper - drawing on material from Susan Douglas' book Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 - I noted how in the radio's early years (first decade of the 20th century) the main use of radios was for one-to-one communication among individuals. It was only after government regulation - due in part to the Titanic incident but probably mainly to the Navy's realization of how important radio was to its communication during World War I - that radio became more of a broadcasting medium where spectrum allocation was centrally regulated. (For more details, see the paper, it's just a few pages long.) It was interesting to read that yet again, almost exactly a century later, a very similar phenomenon is coming to the fore: individual users' wireless Internet access may be interfering with military communication and the potential for regulation is in the air (pun intended). December 2002 S M T W T F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31         Links of Interest How to win the Nobel Prize Click for Mammogram Play "Match That Blogger" Blogathon 03 Archives Recent entries » Extending Internet access to low-income communities » Shattered » The story behind red alert » Weekend trivia » Would you cut up a book? » Pizza, cholesterol check, the works » Welcome » A different kind of road trip » Allowing comments on blogs » Paddling for bandwidth » The right to a soda.. at any price » Online communities » Silly.. but we all do it » Paris notes » New book on Social Inequality Previous entries May, 2002 - July, 2003 Blogger info Eszter Hargittai Communication Studies Department Northwestern University Evanston, Illinois 60208 blog at eszter dot com Blogs I Visit The small print A few words on what I will and will not post on this blog (taken from my E-LIST entry of January 2, 2002). I have nothing against posting commercial sites as long as they come highly recommended. In fact, I'm quite interested in improving informed consumer choice so I'm very curious to hear about good experiences with online retailers. What I will refrain from posting are sites that require plug-ins or programs that are painful to deal with. Example: I will not post anything that only works with RealOne/RealPlayer as that program is intrusive and annoying beyond belief and I am not willing to reinstall it on my machine (it was hard enough to get rid of it completely in the first place) nor do I want to encourage others to have it. If your site has audio content, please make it available in multiple formats or choose one that can be run on multiple players (e.g. .avi). Feel free to link to my Weblog with or without this graphic button. http://www.esztersblog.com

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