Yes, indeed. The book is now from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. Buy it today — it’s only $8.76 or 2.75 pounds.  What a bargain!

My blog, “Forget the Footnotes“, is what got me into trouble with my university, the London School of Economics and Political Science. Read and ponder. More about me here.

The posts below contain the collection of sources, links and articles which I relied on in writing the book. Connoisseurs of academic gossip should check out the “LSE File” collection of emails and documents. If you are looking for something, please use the search window to the right.

Since this project now is concluded, I’m no longer updating this page.  I am, however, still reading comments, so please leave one.  My current blog, “Too Many Mangoes,” is here.

yours ever,

Erik

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These are some of the places on the web where my book has been mentioned:

• Timothy Patrick McCarthy, “PAL-117C: The Arts of Communication,” John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Spring 2008. (”There are four required books for this course …” — of which the Manifesto is one!)
• Alessio Altichieri, “Scrivo un Blog, Ergo Sum,” Corriere della Sera, January 18, 2008. (”“A Blogger’s Manifesto”, è scritto da un personaggio un po’ lunare, lo svedese Erik Ringmar …”)
• Christopher Howse, “By So Many, to So Few,” The Spectator, January 12, 2008. (”Ringmar takes selfrighteousness to extremes, arguing that a girlfriend should not complain if a blog reveals that she has a sexually transmitted disease.”)
• Wikipedia, “Blog“
• The Scientific Misconduct Blog (”an excellent little book”)
• Light Traces (in Russian)
• Donald Macleod, “Free Speech on the Blog,” The Guardian, October 19, 2007.
• OpenLife, “A Blogger’s Manifesto“
• Grumpy Old Bookman, “Catching Up?” (”Ringmar is an academic who has been on the sharp end of a freedom-of-speech dispute”)
• Dave Cole, “A Blogger’s Manifesto“
• John Angliss, “Erik Ringmar’s Blogging Book” (”has a fantastic chapter about why multinational corporations and institutions just don’t ‘get’ blogging. “)
• Reflection 2.0 (”He’s also very candid about his blogging experience and does a really good job of explaining in simple terms the basics of blogging, Technorati, and the like. I’m so stuck in the edublogosphere that I forget that there’s an entire world of blogs (much larger than this) about completely unrelated topics.  He’s rather in-your-face and and the book is written in a very conversational tone. “)

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Matt Frei, the BBC North America correspondent has an interesting program about blogs in the US (from my friend Paolo):

• BBC, Radio 4, “New Kids on the Blog“

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I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake as far as this case is concerned (I don’t read British papers regularly anymore …). A British woman, Samina Malik, has just been convicted of thinking thoughts which aren’t allowed in contemporary BrItain (yes, she’s Muslim, yes, she posted it on the web).

More here:

• Guardian, “‘Lyrical Terrorist’ Sentenced over Extremist Poetry,” December 5, 2007.

These are some comments:

• Matthew Parris, “Think No Evil? Are You Serious?,” Times Online, November 17, 2007.
• Inayat Bunglawala, “Don’t Even Think about It,” Guardian, December 5, 2007.

Her only crime, as far as I can see, is that her poetry was so crap. What we need more of is good terrorist poetry. Let the poetic hand grenades fly!

The following is a very bloody example of terrorist poetry. A poem that advocates the destruction of an entire British town:

Read the rest of this entry »

republic of bloggers | 1 Comment »

I got the book today, my very own hard-copy! I’m really very happy with it. Anthem did a great job. I like the cover a lot, and the feel of the book in my hand. OK, it’s kind of a slight volume, but some things are best said succinctly.

The book is clearly quite pick-up-able. It was laying around on a table at home today and my daughter Saga, 12, picked it up and started reading. That never happened before with any of my books. After browsing a couple of pages she turned to me and asked: “Pappa, are you going to go back to writing boring books again after this one?” Out of the mouths of babes!

Actually even my wife picked up the book, quite unprompted, and began reading. That too is a first.

Will I go back to writing boring books after this one? You bet.

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“Things You Didn’t Know about Facebook” is a new Facebook group that is very sceptical of some of the business practices of Mark Zuckerberg et al (from my friend Leda).  Did you know that …

• … your profile picture may end up in public FACEBOOK advertisements with reference to products you have purchased via the Internet? (FACEBOOK BEACON)
• … the owner of FACEBOOK Mark Zuckerberg has rejected offers in the range of $975 million to hand over Facebook. When FACEBOOK is to be sold, all registered kind of private information will be handed over to the new owners – even though you at that time already have deleted your profile! It means, you have no control, who will end up having your personal data.
• … October 24, 2007, Facebook has agreed to sell a 1.6% stake in the company to Microsoft for $240 million. This means Microsoft, as an exclusive third-party will get assess to all kind of private FACEBOOK information

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This Western blogger in Shanghai got into serious trouble for writing about how to pick up and have sex with Chinese women. Apparently he was ruining their lives and making it impossible for them to find a future husband.  Poor them.  His blog is here:

• Sex and Shanghai / 欲望上海

Here are some comments:

• Danwei, “Sex and Shanghai a Hoax?“
• 花崗齋雜記, “Sex in Shanghai“
• Postcards from China, “Sex and Shanghai’s Chinabounder“
• Shanghaiist, “So This Guy Has Lots of Sex and Writes about It on the Internet?“

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This is a neat little web page that allows you to make comparisons of Google search results in different countries:

• Google Geotargeted World-Wide Search

Hmmm… I wonder if the search results for “falun gong” are any different in Mainland China and Taiwan …

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Five prominent American academics have declared themselves “fed up” with “aggressive incursion of partisan politics into universities’ hiring and tenure practices,” and issued a call to “defend academic freedom.”  The story is here:

• Inside Higher Education, “A Call to Defend Academic Freedom

This is a representative quote:

“In recent years, universities across the country have been targeted by outside groups seeking to influence what is taught and who can teach. To achieve their political agendas, these groups have defamed scholars, pressured administrators, and tried to bypass or subvert established procedures of academic governance,” the statement says. “As a consequence, faculty have been denied jobs or tenure, and scholars have been denied public platforms from which to share their viewpoints. This violates an important principle of scholarship, the free exchange of ideas, subjecting them to ideological and political tests. These attacks threaten academic freedom and the core mission of institutions of higher education in a democratic society.”

Obviously much of the context here is the Middle East and the activities of the pro-Israel lobby, but academic freedom is under threat everywhere, not least from market forces.  The price of freedom is, as always, eternal vigilance.

universities and blogging | 4 Comments »

This is a web page showing videos of a beautiful Chinese girl dressed in a cocktail dress and high-heels stomping little kittens to death. I wish I had thought of that! Is it for real or maybe just an ad for high-heel shoes? Judge for yourselves:

• The First Post, “Snuff Movie Provokes Cultural Revolution“
• China Horror
• Chinastic, “Who Is the Glamorous Kitten Killer of Hangzhou?“
• Danwei, “Animal Cruelty in the Mainland Press“

secrets of the heart | No Comments »

In my class on freedom of speech on the internet I gave my students the assignment to link to a web site that they think should be banned. All in all they are a lot more prudish than I am (or at least they pretend to be). One student had a very nice discussion of the pros and cons of being confronted with material that is truly alien:

culture shock happens to people when they contact a new and unfamiliar “world. internet just easily brings everything into people’s lives without any permission. so there got a problem. different culture brings different concepts, different positions. it challenges us to face people with different thoughts.”

This is the list of sites they came up with:
Read the rest of this entry »

research diary | 1 Comment »

Bad news from Italy (from my friend Sal): in the country with the most oligopolistic media structure in Europe, blogs are now going to be restricted by law.  And this isn’t even Berlusconi’s idea, but Prodi’s:

The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money.

As Beppe Grillo comments:

“Blogs are being born every second, anyone can start one without a problem and they can write their thoughts, publish photos and videos. In fact, the route proposed by Levi limits access to the Internet. What young person is going to submit to all these hoops to do a blog? The Levi-Prodi law obliges anyone who has a website or a blog to get a publishing company and to have a journalist who is on the register of professionals as the responsible director.”

republic of bloggers | 1 Comment »

Interesting review (from my friend Martin) of a recent report on blogging and journalistic ethics:

• Cecilia Friend and Jane B. Singer, Online Journalism Ethics: Traditions and Transitions
• Folke Schimanski, “Etik under press,” Computer Sweden (in Swedish)

Here is a representative quote:

“Who is a journalist and who is not? The reporter or commentator who acts acts like he was a godly authority still exists to be sure but he no longer has the same elevated position. People have grown tired of the traditional journalist and his supposedly objective monologue. The consumers of media don’t what to be talked to but have come to see the journalistic product as a part of an ongoing dialog.”

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The publisher of the book, Anthem, only now discovered that it’s possible to download the entire text online. Funny, I told them months ago. Maybe they were too busy reading books to notice? No, they’re not ordering me to take the downloads down, just politely asking whether I think it would hurt sales. Would it?

Sales surely won’t be hurt. What’s a stack of A4s compared to a nice book with a pretty cover? (provided it’s cheap enough),

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This is a very interesting story about secrecy in the EU, Sweden and the bio-tech company Monsanto (from my friend Fatosh). Apparently the Monsanto people want to keep information secret which according to Swedish law must be made publicly available. The EU is initiating legal action against the Swedes:

• EU Observer, “EU Criticizes Swedes over Transparency Move“

At the time of Sweden’s EU application — in the early 1990s — there was a lot of talk of Sweden as a leaky pipe where the secrets of the EU would come pouring out. Not nearly enough has happened so far. Leak, baby, leak! (You don’t have to be a Swede to believe in freedom of information but it probably helps …)

republic of bloggers | No Comments »

This is another flabbergasting case of private censorship by a UK internet provider (from my friend Dave):

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, has a blog where he discusses human rights abuses in Central Asia. The local maffia businessman, Alisher Usmanov — who in addition to his other crimes owns 15 percent of Arsenal football club — objected to some of the things that Murray wrote and convinced the UK-based web host, Fastnet, to pull the plug on the blog (and in the process taking down a number of other blogs, including that of Boris Johnson, the mayor-wannabe of London).

More stories here:

• Chicken Yoghurt
• Bloggerheads
• Slashdot, “Bloggers versus Billionaire“
• and a story from Moscow Times.

Meanwhile, Craig Murray’s main web page is accessible here.

When will private UK/US web hosts ever stop taking orders from plutocrats and authoritarian rulers? Bloggers in democratic countries — and our freedom to speak — need better protection.

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My friend Chi-Pen suggested we’d try to get a Chinese edition out of The Manifesto. Now that’s a cool idea. There is a lot of interest in the internet and blogging in China. Embarassingly, they’ll be keen to hear that Western countries too — and UK universities — have problems with freedom of speech!

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I can already hear the cheery “ho, ho, ho” of Mr Amazon as he is approaching with his book bag. Only a few more days to go.

Dear Customer,

We wanted to give you an update on the status of your order. Unfortunately, the release date for the item(s) listed below was changed by the supplier, and we need to provide you with a new estimated delivery date based on the new release date:

• Erik Ringmar (Author) “A Blogger’s Manifesto” [Paperback]

Estimated arrival date: 08/10/07 - 09/10/07. We are sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Actually the latest word from the publisher is that the book will be out on October 15th.  We’ll be spending next week preparing the marketing effort.

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The LSE’s Dept of Government now has a “students diary blog.” Ha, ha, ha, ha! That’s the funniest things I’ve heard all day. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

When will they ever learn? Official web pages, like those of a university, just can’t blog. It’s not believable. And this is for exactly the same reason that white middle-age politicians shouldn’t wear baseball caps turned backward then talking to members of ethnic minorities. You’re only showing how utterly out of touch you are.

OK, let me give you a suggestion (because I’m a nice guy): why doesn’t the Govt Dept start a web forum where students can ask questions to staff? In addition, why doesn’t the Convenor start his own blog? This would be genuinely interesting for students to read (especially if the convenor in question reveals himself to be half-way literate).

the LSE file | 2 Comments »

This is a blogger involved in the current popular uprising in Burma (from my friend Simon):

• Ko Htike’s Prosaic Collection

Perhaps surprisingly in one of the world’s poorest countries, blogging appears to play an important role — both as a way of documenting the activities of the popular movement and as a way of coordinating them.

This is a BBC story on the topic (also from Simon):

• “Burma Cyber-Dissidents Crack Censorship“

Oct 11 update: the Burmese gov’t is cracking down on communication networks:

• Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/burma/story/0,,2186651,00.html

republic of bloggers | 1 Comment »

The latest issue of the New York Review of Books has a review by Michael Tomasky of Al Gore’s The Assault on Reaon. Apparently the book concludes as an ode to blogging:

In his concluding chapter, Gore places his hopes in the Internet as the source of a new civic forum with the potential to change the way we talk to one another. … In Gore’s view:

“Generally speaking, bloggers are concerned citizens who want to share their ideas and opinions with the rest of the public. Some have genuinely interesting things to say, while others do not, but what is most significant about blogging may be the process itself. By posting their ideas online, bloggers are reclaiming the tradition of our Founders of making their reflections on the national state of affairs publicly available.”

Maybe I should have asked Gore to write a preface to my book? Or at least a friendly back-cover quote? (No, Al Gore did NOT invent the internet).

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This is a tale of mirth and woe which recounts the time Scaryduck tried to buy a couch (link from my friend Dave). Great example of consumer empowerment.

• “On Complaining“

Yes, he is blogging this.

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Work on the book is now finished — covers, blurbs, etc are all done, done, donissimo. I’m really happy with the final result. Anthem Press did a good job in the end. Let’s now see what everyone else thinks. Early copies should be released at the beginning of October and the book should be out in shops and on Amazon by mid October.

I hate it when my books grow up and leave home. Sob. I feel so lonely.

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This is a funny Guardian article from January of this year referring to the “naughty Erik Ringmar.”  “Naughty”?  Me?  (Too bad I didn’t notice it when it first appeared, it would have cheered me up):

Remember naughty Erik Ringmar, who warned sixth-formers that rather than apply to the London School of Economics, his employer at the time, they should go for the rather less prestigious London Metropolitan University? Now the government lecturer has told undergraduates on no account to enrol for a PhD. “Don’t do it!” he writes on his blog. “There are a million other ways to spend your life which are more rewarding, both personally and financially … When you turn 32, your friends will start to make megabucks while you still struggle to get money for a bus pass. You might not like what the PhD turns you into, or your girl/boyfriend might not like it. In fact, halfway through, he/she is likely to leave you.”

Not very accurate reporting of what I actually said of course, but pretty funny nonetheless.

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This is the Queen of Sky, one of the more famous doocees, explaining herself on American cable TV:

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This semester I’m giving a course at NCTU on “freedom of speech and censorship in the age of the internet.” As always there is a lot of working setting up a new course, but it’s also great fun. Yes, the course is very much based on my book and on my LSE experience. Unfortunately you can’t enrol in the course unless you’re an NCTU student, but you can certaintainly check out the Moodle reading list (with lots of nice links):

• Erik Ringmar, NCTU course, fall 2007: “Freedom of Speech in the Age of the Internet“

Any comments on the course would be much appreciated. Is it stupid to assign Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” Is it off-topic? Too difficult?

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When I joined Facebook last year I was amazed to find that there were some 12,000 LSE students — present and past — on the site and not a single member of the LSE staff. This, however, is now changing. Yesterday I got a cheerful Facebook message from Rosie Gosling, director of the external program at LSE. Hi Rosie! Who says you can’t teach old dogs new tricks?

Of course there aren’t any full-time LSE academics on Facebook yet.  That’ll be the day.

the LSE file | 2 Comments »

My friend Fatosh sent me a link to another Bildt story. Apparently he is now on Facebook. How cool is he!

• Bild Joins the World of Facebook

Checking him out, it turns out he only has 18 friends. Not that much for a foreign minister. I invited him to become my friend of course, but I’m not expecting him to reciprocate. Btw, Bildt has his own fan club. After swollowing hard, I joined!

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I’ve missed out on an interesting feature on the BBC website: their occasional “round-up of Iraqi bloggers.” This is enlightening both for what it says about Iraq under occupation and for what it says about blogs in relation to mainstream media.

• August 10, 2007
• May 4, 2007
• January 12, 2007
• December 21, 2006

BBC ads this cute little apology: “This story contains links to external websites which are not subject to the usual BBC editorial controls.” And as the latest edition of the page informs us: “Several of the Iraqi bloggers featured in previous roundups have left the country.” Wonder why?

republic of bloggers | No Comments »

A very talented person at Anthem has set to work on the cover for the book. There are two versions. I can’t quite make up my mind which one I prefer. Both are great.

Still, I do think they should have given my sis-in-law a shot at making a cover. The ways of publishers are inscrutable.

research diary | 3 Comments »

This, by the way, is the author’s bio that goes on the back of the book:

Erik Ringmar is Professor at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He is the author of Interest, Identity & Action (CUP, 2007) and Surviving Capitalism: How We Learned to Live with the Market and Remained Almost Human (Anthem, 2005), as well as many academic articles in the fields of history, international politics and sociology. He received a PhD in political science from Yale University in 1993 and between 1995 and 2007 he taught in the Government Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He lives deep in the Taiwanese mountains surrounded by gorgeous females (one wife, four daughters). He is a Linux user, a Bob Dylan fan, and likes to eat roast duck. His next book, The Fury of the Europeans, deals with imperialism in China in the nineteenth-century.

Erik wrote his first blog entries in January 2006.  Already two months later his university, the LSE in London, insisted he “take down and destroy” his blog.

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Anthem Press, the publisher, got a neat quote from Norman Solomon, the US columnist etc. What a great guy! He even promised he would mention the book in one of his forthcoming pieces.

“Anyone eager to understand how cyberspace has changed our possibilities — and how it often remains trapped in grim social contexts — would do well to read Erik Ringmar’s A Blogger’s Manifesto. With cogent abandon, this book shreds academic and political conceits as fast as you can turn a page. The author goes far beyond the usual simplistic theories of the Web as menace or savior to explore what actual experience tells us — about the frequent suppression of ‘free speech’ within social orders that treasure the rhetoric of democracy and the controlling interest of cash flow. In tandem with his enthusiasm for the blog universe, Ringmar astutely points out its limitations: ‘Sounding off on one topic after another in your blog isn’t going to change anything. If you want to have an impact what you need is real power.’ Don’t expect top execs at Google or Microsoft to tout this book as a visionary manifesto for the digital age; Ringmar’s vision is far too subversive for that.”

Norman Solomon, Syndicated columnist on media and politics; Author, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State“

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This is my suggestion for a back-cover blurb for the book. I mailed it off to the publisher today.

“Of course we believe in freedom of speech,” say members of the establishment, “we believe in freedom of speech even for those who say things we hate. Freedom of speech, after all, is a pillar of modern, liberal, society.”

Yeah right. There was never such a thing as freedom of speech. In order to speak freely you had to have access to a printing press, a newspaper, a radio or a TV station. And everywhere you had to get past the editors. Only an elite ever did — the articulate and well-behaved representatives of ordinary people. But ordinary people themselves never had a chance to speak publicly.

Not until now. Today the internet revolution — led by a ragtag army of bloggers — has given us all a chance to be irreverent, blasphemous and ungrammatical in public. We can reveal secrets, blow whistles, spill beans, or just make stuff up. “Did I ever tell you about my boss and that hooker from Amsterdam?”

Of course the old elites don’t like it. Of course they really, really hate it. Blogs are shut down left, right and center, and bloggers are silenced, reprimanded and fired from their jobs. Suddenly modern liberal society reveals a repressive face few of us knew existed.

Should we behave ourselves? Should we fall silent? Hell no! Let’s call them on their hypocrisy. Let’s demand that modern liberal society lives by the principles it claims to embrace. Bloggers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your gags.

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This is a guy who claims that bloggers are illiterate and that the consequences for our culture are far-reaching and disastrous.  Could that really be the case?

• The Guardian, “I Don’t Think Bloggers Read“
• see also Michael Gorman, “Revenge of the Blog People,” Library Journal.

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My publisher is looking for someone who can write a preface to my book. They contacted Noam Chomsky, but he can’t do it/doesn’t have the time. But he suggested a number of names, however, which Anthem is in the process of following up: Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman, Norman Solomon, Danny Schechter, Robert McChesney.

My own preferred list of preface writers include:

• Cass Sunstein
• Lawrence Lessig
• Richard Stallman
• Ed Felten

All are of course pretty difficult fish to catch.

research d