Science, IT and Society

Keith Suter

The largest loss of life ever sustained by the Australian media industry took place on October 16 1975 at the East Timor village of Balibo. Five journalists were killed. All the governments that had citizens involved in the deaths have refused to reveal all that they know. This article is an account of what most likely happened, why the truth has been obscured for so long, how the truth is gradually coming to light thanks to the efforts of some journalists and non-governmental organizations, and what are the lessons of this saga for journalists in armed conflict.

Peter Horsfield
 
The creation of virtual reality environments has become one of the major celebrations, attractions and causes of concern in the development and application of digital technologies today. Because of their profound social, economic and humanistic implications, the development and applications of technological virtual realities are urgent and vital areas for ethical reflection and debate. Doing so, however, requires clarifying not just what is meant by ‘virtual reality’, but also locating digital virtual realities within the context of the place of virtual reality in human experience and historical instances of differently mediated virtual realities.

Gergana Doncheva
 
The problem of self-representation is extremely complicated because it is directly connected to the theme of collective guilt. Cinematographers bear heavy responsibility when they evoke certain events because in this way they create, consciously or unconsciously, models through which history should be perceived and understood. However, the moral responsibility of these artists compels them to state their explicit assessment of the past and to offer adequate answers to the questions: What exactly happened, who are we and how can we repent? In other words, as Emir Kosturitsa said in one of his interviews: ‘History cannot be told as a Benneton-style fashion-show, which made advertising videos drowned in blood. You have to keep your dignity, create only personal things and defend them to the end.’1

Albert van den Heuvel
 
Religious communities, like all other agents of culture, have to come to terms with information technologies and the avalanche of scientific expansion sponsored by them. For Christian churches these developments mean a challenge not only to the format of their thinking and their life, but to the very core of their existence.

Paula Tompkins
 
Part the appeal of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is the ease and freedom of communicating with unseen Others. We create long distance relationships, even communities, as if we were physically present to one another. Can we trust the truthfulness of those we never meet?

by Pradip Thomas.
A defining feature of the ‘knowledge’ economy is its embedding in what Mark Poster once rather tentatively termed the ‘mode of information’ (Poster:1984) (1)

Dan Schiller
 
For at least a quarter of a century, the leadership of the developed market economies [DMEs], above all that of the United States, has insisted that ‘computers, telecommunications, and the services which grow out of or depend on those technologies… are the critical industries for continued economic growth.1 Policymakers have therefore consecrated themselves to the promotion of a newly informationalized political economy. This involved a dramatic redesign of the architecture of global capitalism. What provoked this phase-shift? What are its chief structural features? What, in particular, have science and technology contributed to this emerging, informationalized capitalism?

Kim Yong-Bock
 
At the start, let the reader be warned that this article will be a bit polemical for the purpose of clarifying the issues, particularly the relations between modern science and faith in the context of globalization today. My treatment of the subject is done, moreover, through a kind of macro- or telescopic discourse in order to have an integrated perspective, which also means that my research and reflection are incomplete and imperfect.

Steven Best and Douglas Kellner
‘O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world
That has such people in’t.’
(William Shakespeare, The Tempest)

Patricia Harkin, Steve Jones and James J. Sosnoski
In the early 1900s, particularly in the 1920s, African-American literature, art, music, dance, and social commentary began to flourish in the section of New York City known as Harlem. This African-American cultural movement became known as “The New Negro Movement” and later as the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance transformed not only African-American identity and history, but also American culture in general. Never before had so many Americans read the thoughts of African-Americans and embraced the African-American community’s productions, expressions, and style. The following article describes the Virtual Harlem project, a collaborative virtual reality tour of Harlem in which participants can travel back 80 years to see and hear historical figures, speeches and music from that period.