What the world is reading

Just because were told something countless times doesnt make it true. So The Independent goes on to debunk 50 received wisdoms of modern Britain. An interesting,witty read and a peek from the other side of myths we create for convenience. A few examples. Common knowledge: Damien Hirst is a brilliant artist. Common sense: A review of his latest paintings declared them dreadful. And Twitter is cool,so long as the depth you are worth of is a mere 140 characters. Also George Clooney is a natural good-looker wrong,they tell us; dont eat before you swim food is the fuel thatll keep strokes strong; religion is the cause of all wars oil,anyone?; Michael Jackson was the king of pops from 1992 onwards,Jackson would manage to hit the top of the charts only once more until his death; the Internet makes life more efficient not when we rush to find our books for the plumber and phone numbers.

LE MONDE

Watching me watching you

We fret too much about formal surveillance in the form of CCTV cameras,and street cameras,and often tend to forget how much we voluntary indulge in a more complex personal surveillance,triggered off by social networking sites such as Facebook. This new form of voyeurism,rooted in an appetite for peer-to-peer surveillance for security reasons or just for fun seems to be becoming common. Author Miyase Christensen says a generation welcomed into the world by fathers holding digital video recorders might not question so much why others should have access to personal details. The author says Facebook,though seemingly low-key on advertising,tracks user behaviour,making note of which fan sites are visited or how long is spent on a shopping site. However,the author does not suggest doing away with these social networking sites as an option. 8230;what matters now is not us being watched,but the information we leak, the article concludes.

GUARDIAN

It all started 96 hours after 9/11

Most historians choose September 11,2001,as the decades significant date. David Hare differs and says if he were to choose the day when the destiny of the new century really took shape,then Id opt for 96 hours later. On September 15,George Bush and his Cabinet colleagues met at Camp David and over chicken noodle soup,fried chicken and mashed potatoes,began to yield to the dazzling temptation of deliberately pursuing the wrong suspect. And since,they have all Looked Away,he says,from everything. Hare says it is hard to remember a time in history when things that really mattered received so little attention. Climate change,the social consequences of the growing gap between rich and poor,the ridiculous size of the prison population and the essential corruption of politics8230;were all held to be nothing next to the immediacy of the threat from the mujahideen. Reluctant to speak ill of looking away though,he says that is the reason we created professionals. Their job,to Look At.

OPEN DEMOCRACY

What was Communism?

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall,Fred Halliday tries to take a fresh view of communism,and to bury communism can only be done on the basis of recognising what it represented, he justifies. Communism,may have been a dictatorial tendency whereby revolutionary elites seized control of societies,a flawed movement for the self-emancipation of the working class,or even a product of oriental despotism. And yet,it contained features of modern politics that cannot be overlooked,it was in its prime a global movement of collective purposive action. It had its illusions nevertheless. Halliday concludes that its greatest contribution has been,not to serve as an alternative to capitalism,but its contribution to the modernisation of capitalism itself. However,as its sympathisers fully knew as early as 1917 itself,it was a movement bound from the beginning to fail.