the other day I went to see 25th Hour, Spike Lee’s recent film starring Edward Norton. As I often do, I went to Salon to read the review after having seen it. So the article loads and instead of waiting, I start to read before the photo appears. By the time it does, I’m at the end reading, “Lee is a pro, and he knows how to work with reference, allusion and metaphor: There’s a “Cool Hand Luke” poster in Monty’s apartment…” and then 20 seconds later I scroll to the top, only to find that the photo I skipped should feature that very poster – but it has been blanked out! And blanked out artfully enough that if you weren’t looking for it you wouldn’t know that the photo was NOT true to the film itself. This isn’t that big a deal, but it does make you wonder how widespread this practice is.

but it looks like the whole Survey of the Internet Society in the Economist is worth a look. The Economist has for a long time featured surprisingly good coverage of these sorts of issues – it looks like this survey is no exception.