[lbo-talk] 911 Timeline

snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Sun Apr 18 14:23:16 PDT 2004


someone just put this up at my company's blog. a year ago, i _never_ would have imagined the person who did so saying that we ought to get out now. last fall, i sent a joke about Shrub and was given the cold shoulder b/c "we should support our prezdinet during war" so shame on me. today, the same person is comparing it all to viet nam, an era she lived through!

http://complete911timeline.org/main/dayof911.html

otherwise, a very cool site: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/index.jsp

Introduction

The last ten years have witnessed a revolutionary change in the political economy of information production and distribution.

Control of these two processes has slipped from the exclusive grip of large media conglomerates and is now being appropriated at an increasingly fast pace by people at the grassroots level, whose previous lack of access to the means of information production prevented their ideas and knowledge from reaching the masses. The Internet's impact on the global political-economic landscape has been formidable, as it has decentralized and democratized the production and distribution of knowledge. This historically significiant restructuring of the relationship between the producers and consumers of information is due to the fact that the dissemination of information to a large audience no longer requires large amounts of capital investment. Consequently, this process can no longer be easily monopolized, controlled, or filtered by a small elite group.

Alternative media websites have played a crucial role in forging and maintaining critical awareness, providing people with unfiltered investigative journalism, articles from around the world, and a variety of non-mainstream opinions and analyses. As a result, many users of the Internet have been able to stay up-to-date on a wide variety of issues at a minimal cost in time and effort. This revolution in information technology has undermined the capacity of elite groups to control the content and direction of the published historical record.

The aim of this website is to take the process of decentralizing the production and distribution of information a step further.

Content

The Center for Cooperative Research website consists of timelines of events on various subjects as well as profiles of people, organizations, corporations, and other entities. The timelines and profiles also contain association links which map the relationships between the various events and entities.

The website is "open-content" in the sense that its content can be modified by any person. Anyone who registers can submit information to the website or suggest changes to the existing content. The significance of this cannot be understated. It allows for the historical record to be documented at the grassroots level. Moreover, it helps shift control of the means of information production away from Big Business to anyone with a computer and Internet access.

Objectives of website

Reduce the fragmentation of the historical record The Cooperative Research website seeks to help reduce the fragmentation of the historical record by connecting events whose temporal and spatial relationships are often obscured by a mass of contradicting and disconnected literature, the biases of the media, and the tendency for important past events to be relegated to the annals of forgotten history.

Increase the efficiency of research Another objective is to increase the efficiency of research by reducing the tendency for researchers to duplicate the efforts of others. All too often, researchers—largely because of a fragmented historical record—needlessly spend a significant amount of time and energy bringing material together and establishing connections, even though this work may have already been performed by someone else. By collecting a mass of well-cited "event summaries" and "entity profiles" in a database, with descriptions about the relationships that exist among them, this website should reduce the frequency of such occurences.

Encourage the transition of oversight responsibilities from governments to civil society on a global scale. The Center for Cooperative Research calls on people to abandon the widely-held assumption that governments can be relied upon to competently monitor the activities of themselves or the entities with which they have close relations. A major goal of this website is to encourage people to play an active role in scrutinizing the activities of all individuals, groups and institutions that wield significant political and economic power. Our position is that the power of oversight should not rest with governments, but with civil society itself.



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