Chomsky on Snowden, Žižek on Buddhism, Fuchs on social media and the public sphere

• In a recent editorial Noam Chomsky considers the Snowden revelations and their implications:

These exposures lead us to inquire into state policy more generally and the factors that drive it. The received standard version is that the primary goal of policy is security and defense against enemies.

The doctrine at once suggests a few questions: security for whom, and defense against which enemies? The answers are highlighted dramatically by the Snowden revelations.

Policy must assure the security of state authority and concentrations of domestic power, defending them from a frightening enemy: the domestic population, which can become a great danger if not controlled.

• Slavoj Žižek presented at the recent "WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH SEX?" conference. Video of Žižek's presentation is here with the title "Buddhism naturalized":

• Christian Fuchs recently delivered the inaugural lecture in social media at the University of Westminster. Video of the full lecture, titled "Social Media and the Public Sphere" is available here. Abstract for the lecture:

Social media has become a key term in Media and Communication Studies and public discourse for characterising platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Wordpress, Blogspot, Weibo, Pinterest, Foursquare and Tumblr. This lecture discusses the role of the concept of the public sphere for understanding social media critically. It argues against an idealistic interpretation of Habermas and for a cultural-materialist understanding of the public sphere concept that is grounded in political economy. It sets out that Habermas’ original notion should best be understood as a method of immanent critique that critically scrutinises limits of the media and culture grounded in power relations and political economy. It introduces a theoretical model of public service media that it uses as foundation for identifying three antagonisms of the contemporary social media sphere in the realms of the economy, the state and civil society. It concludes that these limits can only be overcome if the colonisation of the social media lifeworld is countered politically so that social media and the Internet become public service and commons-based media.