In this lecture covering topics from his latest book, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman describes the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that effectively leveled the economic world, and "accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next-door neighbors. This lecture is available through the MIT Open Courseware Project.

For an interesting companion piece to this lecture, have a look at the recent short film Ha Ha Ha America, by Jon Daniel Ligon, available on the Sundance Festival site at:

http://festival.sundance.org/2006/watch/film.aspx?which=402&category=DOC

FibrecultureJournal is a peer reviewed journal from Australia that explores the issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social formations. The journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of: