Attention Economy - February 3, 2023

The contrasting lives — and posthumous fates — of Jonson and Shakespeare are a minor but recurring theme in the deeply researched but happily readable new biography of Jonson by Ian Donaldson, entitled “Ben Jonson: A Life.” A general editor of the forthcoming seven-volume “Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson,” Donaldson has a case to make that, despite the Shakespearean eclipse, Jonson was as central to the development of the British theater as Shakespeare was — in some ways perhaps more so, at least during the years in which their plays were first produced.

Facebook’s Timeline — the long-anticipated overhaul of the site — is rolling out across the world this week. Timeline allows friends to surf through all your posts going back to the beginning of Facbeook time. Graphically it can be a beautiful thing. Mark Zuckerberg calls it a chance for users to tell the stories of their lives. And over the next few weeks, users across the world will get it on their profile. But here’s the important part — once you get it, you will have just seven days to clean up all your old posts and make it presentable to the world. The problem with Facebook’s Timeline is that the story you chose to tell about your life back in college in 2004 might be considerably different from the story you would like to tell about your life now. But Timeline will make all those old posts and photos documenting things back in the day easily visible to the world.

Brooke asks Harvard Law professor and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society Jonathan Zittrain if access to the internet should be considered a human right. He says that according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to receive and impart information through any media, and today’s media of choice is the internet.

If you have an implanted medical device that can collect data in your body, who owns that information? There doesn’t appear to be a clear answer to the question. Brooke speaks to Hugo Campos, a patient advocate and founder of the ICD User Group, about his unsuccessful attempt to obtain the data collected by his own implanted defibrillator.

This week saw more then its share of internet drama. The US Government led a massive operation against the website MegaUpload. And dozens of major websites staged a blackout in protest of two proposed laws - the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. Bob talks to Techdirt’s Mike Masnick about the implications of the proposed legislation and the foment online.