Laura Poitras talks about “Citizenfour”, her documentary about Edward Snowden, the NSA, and surveillance that won the `Academy Award´. Yes, this is what professionals also call the Oscar - it is now official that the arts have, after many years of activists risking their sanity, freedom and their families, joined the new clash of cultures on the sensitive and progressive side. During a Q&A at the 52nd New York Film Festival, she recalls her transformation from a documentary journalist into an activist during the production of the film that narrates her stay with Glenn Greenwald and Snowden in a hotel in Hong Kong.

Citizenfour won the 2014 Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary and the International Documentary Association award for best documentary feature. It was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for 2015. (our first update from February, 2015: “It has won the Oscar in this...

What would Marshall McLuhan think about the way the internet has evolved during the last decades? This interview followed days of presentation and discussion at the Ars Electronica symposium on the topic of Origins in 2011, the year of Marshall McLuhan’s 100th anniversary. There, lead scientists of the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN, Geneva, explained their technical set-up, their middle- and long-term research goals and discussed their possible significance with other scientists and philosophers. Derrick de Kerckhove sits down with Leo Findeisen to discuss how Marshall McLuhan might have reacted to the state of the art in experimental physics. McLuhan has been one the founders of Media Theory as we know and de Kerckhove has been his long-time assistant back in the days.

Topics discussed:

* How would you explain the relevance of McLuhan´s work to a fourteen-year-old, a member of the Always-On generation that lives a digital life at the current stage of the information revolution?

* Would McLuhan have laughed about the fact that the World Wide Web was a technical spin-off from...

In a lengthy and dense, yet very understandable interview, two young European intellectuals from Paris and Berlin are dealing with one issue of endangered digital freedom after the other. They count amoung the most knowledgable and experienced analysts of the interplay between political, technical, artistic and private engagement, a crucial quality in these kinds of cultural conflicts. Their ongoing work can be visited at laquadrature.net and netzpolitik.org (in German language). The prolific information video about ACTA that is mentioned can be watched here.

In October 2011, the well-known internet expert Clay Shirky, a professor of New Media at New York University, has given a remarkable lecture on the state of Freedom of the Press in Western democracy. He makes a comparison between the technical, territorial, political and legal implications of the Watergate scandal, the recent publications of Collateral Murder and the documents of Cablegate that were published online by Wikileaks. He concludes that they are inherently different and builds his argument on an analysis of incidents long after the Gutenberg revolution in the 17th century where publications outside of a national territory could not be controlled by its legislation. The future implications for the protection of Freedom of Speech are, however, in no way encouraging in Shirky´s view, he holds that national regulation of Free Speech in democratic countries is at stake. ” (…)  this is a dangerous moment for free speech. Not because we know how nation...