http://stream001.radio.hu:443/stream/20111203_223000_1.mp3

Program

Nov 24, Thursday

18:00-20:00 | Discourse on nuclear energy: patterns, ideologies and reflections

The discourse on nuclear energy is influenced by politics and ideologies. We provide an interactive discussion combined with visual presentations, with special focus on exploring the communication patterns of nuclear catastrophes, nuclear waste deposits, and also the communication of the local ‘hot potato’: the closure and the recently considered possible re-opening of the local uranium mine.

Media experts as well as specialized journalists are also invited.

Panelists:

• Ms Anna Vári, Research Institute of Sociology of Hungarian Academy of Sciences: Social participation,  environmental risk management, and  public opinion forming
• Mr Zsolt Szijártó, Head of Department of Communication of the University of Pécs: The nature of the debate between ’experts’ and ’lays’ – an example: planned radioactive waste deposit site near Pécs
• Balázs Bodó, media-expert: Centre for Media Research and Education (Budapest University of Technology and Economics)

http://mediakonferencia.eu/

I am at the Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest. I am in two panels and leading a third, so it will be a busy week ahead. Check out the program.

For this seventh Media in Transition conference, we focus directly on our core topic – the experience of transition.

Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition”? The nearly limitless range of design options and communication choices available now and in the future is both exhilarating and challenging, inciting innovation and creativity but also false starts, incompatible systems, planned obsolescence. How are we coping with the instability of platforms?

I will talk about:

Informal Media Economies – What Can We Learn from the Pirates of Yesteryear?, Bodo Balazs
A longer historical lens suggests that the current crisis of copyright, piracy, and enforcement has much in common with earlier periods of conflict among the different participants of the cultural ecosystem. From the early days of the book trade in the 16th century, cultural markets were shaped by several, competing forces: the Crown’s and the Church’s will to control the flow of ideas, publishers’ need to limit competition among themselves, the authors’ need for financial and political independence and the public’s want for cheap and easily accessible print materials. Several, often overlapping formal and informal arrangements have existed between these stakeholders to regulate the cultural field. One of the informal forces that shape cultural markets is what we call piracy. Piracy is the informal network of producers, distributors and sellers that operate beyond the formally regulated economy. The term piracy suggests illegality, but we stress on the informality of these networks, which include a wide variety of practices from the plainly illegal to those that are consciously opt not to rely on the formal regulatory structures to organize themselves. Informal economies are indeed alternatives to formally organized economies, and this alternativity is usually seen as a threat. I, however, would like to argue, that informal networks, piracy included, are not simply threats, but also offer opportunities to improve on formalized structures. This article argues that 300 years after the first formal copyright regulation, formal instruments regulating the production and flow of intellectual properties are still only one, out of many more-or-less formal arrangements that shape cultural markets.

›FIRE PREVENTION‹ SYMPOSIUM
censorship/journalism/new media
On 10 May 2011, Hans Nevídal will once again project fire prevention movies onto the tower of the German National Library, in commemoration of the Burning of the Books in 1933.
This action is accompanied by a symposium of Kunststoff e.V.:
On 7 May 2011, Bodó Balázs (Budapest), Siegfried Lokatis (Leipzig) and others will discuss changes in censorship, focusing on leaks, journalism and new media. Moderation of the symposium, and project curated by: Eva Ursprung (Graz)

http://www.hgb-leipzig.de/index.php?WWW_HGB=a23ba732dda38b196b28b760daf07727&a=aktuell&b=&calid=2845&

The CMCS organizes the event:

Foreign Reporting in the 21st Century: A Roundtable Discussion with Budapest-based Foreign Press

Moderated by Markos Kounalakis, Senior Research Fellow, CMCS

What is the future of foreign reporting? Foreign correspondents since the early 20th century have played a key and influential role in bringing the worlds news to domestic audiences. Reporters covering issues abroad must be experts in the regions affairs, filtering complex events for home audiences who often have limited knowledge of the subject. But the established model of international newsgathering, with foreign reporters working at fixed bureaus overseas, has struggled to survive in the 21st century media landscape.

Traditional news media, hit hard by the economic recession and struggling to compete in the online environment, are closing foreign bureaus or sharply reducing their international newsgathering operations. Digital technologies and citizen journalism have revolutionized newsgathering and distribution, providing free, unfiltered information to the global public.

But what does this mean for the future of foreign reporting? Is there a new, financially feasible business model for foreign reporting in the age of digital journalism? How can traditional reporters compete with citizen journalists who work for free and get to the story first? Can the traditional foreign reporting model adapt to the new media landscape? How will the changes in foreign corresponding impact foreign policy and foreign policy-making?

Markos Kounalakis is President and Publisher Emeritus of the Washington Monthly and a former foreign reporter who covered the end of communism for Newsweek in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, and the outbreak of ethnic strife and war in Yugoslavia. He was based in Rome and Vienna and later ran the magazines Prague satellite bureau for over a year. After Newsweek, he worked as the NBC Radio and Mutual News Moscow correspondent and covered the fall of the Soviet Union as well as the war in Afghanistan. Kounalakis has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The International Herald-Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, and many other regional and international newspapers and magazines.

http://www.cmcs.ceu.hu/news/4-may-roundtable-discussion-foreign-reporting-21st-century

“Models for the Future or Water under the Bridge? The Role of Collecting Societies in National and
European Comparison”

Keynote-Speech: Kerstin Jorna, European Commission (Cabinet Internal Market and Services)
Panelists: Gernot Graninger, AKM; András Szinger, Artisjus; Hrvoje Hribar, FERA/Croatian Audiovisual
Centre; Balázs Bodó, Budapest University of Technology and Economics; Cristina Busch, IMAGO; Patrick
Rackow, ECSA
Moderation: Mercedes Echerer, EU XXL FILM

The world of collecting societies is facing a new order. New – overdue for years – rules on minimum quality
standards of the collecting societies in the EU will be introduced.
Similar basic requirements and the introduction of  a common level playing field are the prerequisites  to
facilitate trans national cooperation. There is a need to finally conquer the online market. Will the EU finally
propose legislative solutions? What is the European Commission planning? What is the position of the
representatives of the EP and the one of the governments? And what are the creatives thinking of all this?

http://www.eu-xxl.at/content.asp?id=58&id2=225&id3=0&lid=2&eid=2

Location: Trafó – House of Contemporary Art
Date: April 10. / 6 pm., Sunday

KBU organized a series of conversation about the synergies and conflicts of global and local networks. We are dealing with the effects and impacts of Facebook-Google-Youtube phenomenon on the local internet content, and what will be the influence on the variety of data, information, news and propagation. The experts are also talking about the changes in the local and national culture, how they strengthen or complete the global communities and networks.

The future of Hungarian e-book market. Roundtable discussion with key players from industry and libraries at Barcamp Budapest.

http://barcamp.ap.hu/

Remix Architecture, an initiative of KÉK – Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre organized a two-days workshop where we discussed the socio-cultural, political and economical aspects of running alternative architectural competitions based on open licenses, such as Creative Commons.

Roundtable discussion on the the MAK exhibition Flowers for Kim Il Sung and the relationship between art and power, censorship and propaganda.

http://www.mak.at/mysql/ausstellungen_show_page.php?a_id=867

http://tranzit.blog.hu/2010/07/15/viragot_kim_ir_szennek

Expert group discussion on the future of Hunhraian music market.

I cordially invite you to the XVIII. International Book Festival, to the launch of my first book ‘Copyright Pirates’. The launch will take place on the 15th of Aprin, 3 PM in the Osztovits Levente hall.

The event will be in English!

I can say by now that I am a regular invitee to the monthly club of the Scientific Association for Infocommunications Hungary where current engineering issues are discussed from the fields of infocommunications, telecommunications, computer science. I am thankful for the organizers that they realized that many of the topics they struggle with have important non-engineering aspects as well, and frequently invite people to talk form the social sciences, cultural studies, law, etc. The topic in February was trolling and moderation, I was talking about the role of anonimity in the digital age.

Szabadság, autonómia és szuverenitás

My colleague, Galántay Zoltán organizes the Hungarian Futorology meetup. I was invited to talk about the future of privacy in the panoptic age. The talk is based on a text soon to be published here.

The Open Society Institute is experimenting with encouraging its grant holders to publish their work under CC licenses. I was invited by OSI to hold a workshop on the niceties of CC licensing.