Radio Berkman: Recent Episodes
Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Jonathan Jackson is a co-founder of Blavity Inc., a technology and media company for black millennials. Blavity’s mission is to "economically and creatively support Black millennials across the African diaspora, so they can pursue the work they love, and change the world in the process." Blavity has grown immensely since their founding in 2014 — among other things, spawning five unique sites, reaching over 7 million visitors a month, and organizing a number of technology, activism, and entrepreneurship conferences.
Jonathan Jackson is also a Joint Fellow with the Nieman Foundation and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society for 2018-2019. During his time here, he says, he is looking for frameworks and unique ways to measure black cultural influence (and the economic impact of black creativity) in the US and around the world.
Jonathan sat down with the Berkman Klein Center’s Victoria Borneman to talk about his work.
Music from this episode: "Jaspertine" by Pling - Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)
More information about this work, including a transcript, can be found here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2019-01/get-know-berkman-klein-fellow-jonathan-jackson
Berkman Klein Center interns sat down with 2018 Berkman Klein Center Fellow Amy Zhang, to discuss her work on combating online harassment and misinformation as well as her research as a Fellow.
According to a recent Pew Research Center study, Instagram is the second most popular platform among 13 to 17-year-olds in the US, after YouTube. Nearly 72 percent of US teenagers are on the image sharing platform.
Our Youth & Media team looked at how teens are using Instagram to figure out who they are. While seemingly just a photo-sharing platform, users have molded Instagram into a more complex social media environment, with dynamics and a shared internal language almost as complex as a typical middle or high school.
This episode was produced by Tanvi Kanchinadam, Skyler Sallick, Quinn Robinson, Jessi Whitby, Sonia Kim, Alexa Hasse, Sandra Cortesi, and Andres Lombana-Bermudez.
More information about this work, including a transcript, can be found here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2018-11/how-youth-are-reinventing-instagram-and-why-having-multiple-accounts-trending
We encounter algorithms all the time. There are algorithms that can guess within a fraction of a percentage point whether you’ll like a certain movie on Netflix, a post on Facebook, or a link in a Google search.
But Risk Assessment Tools now being adopted by criminal justice systems all across the country - from Arizona, to Kentucky, to Pennsylvania, to New Jersey - are made to guess whether you’re likely to flee the jurisdiction of your trial, or commit a crime again if you are released.
With stakes as high as this — human freedom — some are asking for greater caution and scrutiny regarding the tools being developed.
Chris Bavitz, managing director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, helped draft an open letter to the state legislature of Massachusetts about Risk Assessment Tools, co-signed by a dozen researchers working on the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence. He spoke with Gretchen Weber about why we need more transparency and scrutiny in the adoption of these tools.
Read the open letter here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/11/openletter
Even before Election Day, 2016, observers of technology & journalism were delivering warnings about the spread of fake news. Headlines like “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump For President” and “Donald Trump Protestor Speaks Out, Was Paid $3500 To Protest” would pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, and spread like wildfire.
Both of those headlines, and hundreds more like them, racked up millions of views and shares on social networks, gaining enough traction to earn mentions in the mainstream press. Fact checkers only had to dig one layer deeper to find that the original publishers of these stories were entirely fake, clickbait news sites, making up false sources, quotes, and images, often impersonating legitimate news outlets, like ABC, and taking home thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue. But by that time, the damage of fake news was done - the story of the $3500 protestor already calcified in the minds of the casual news observer as fact.
It turns out that it’s not enough to expect your average person to be able to tell the difference between news that is true and news that seems true. Unlike the food companies who create the products on our grocery shelves, news media are not required by law to be licensed, inspected, or bear a label of ingredients and nutrition facts, not that they should or could be.
But the gatekeepers of news media that we encounter in the digital age - the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, search engines like Google, and content hosts like YouTube - could and should be pitching in to help news consumers navigate the polluted sea of content they interact with on a daily basis.
That’s according to Berkman Klein Center co-founder Jonathan Zittrain and Zeynep Tufekci, a techno-sociologist who researches the intersection of politics, news, and the internet. They joined us recently to discuss the phenomenon of fake news and what platforms can do to stop it.
Facebook and Google have recently instituted to processes to remove fake news sites from their ad networks. And since this interview Facebook has also announced options allowing users to flag fake news, and a partnership with the factchecking website Snopes to offer a layer of verification on questionable sites.
For more on this episode visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/radioberkman238
CC-licensed content this week: Neurowaxx: “Pop Circus” (http://ccmixter.org/files/Neurowaxx/14234) Photo by Flickr user gazeronly (https://www.flickr.com/photos/gazeronly/10612167956/)
The effects of surveillance on human behavior have long been discussed and documented in the real world. That nervous feeling you get when you notice a police officer or a security camera? The one that forces you to straighten up and be on your best behavior, even if you're doing nothing wrong? It's quite common.
The sense of being monitored can cause you to quit engaging in activities that are perfectly legal, even desirable, too. It's a kind of "chilling effect." And it turns out it even happens online.
Researcher Jon Penney wanted to know how the feeling of being watched or judged online might affect Internet users' behavior. Does knowledge of the NSA's surveillance programs affect whether people feel comfortable looking at articles on terrorism? Do threats of copyright law retaliation make people less likely to publish blog posts?
Penney's research showed that, yes, the chilling effect has hit the web. On today's podcast we talk about how he did his research, and why chilling effects are problematic for free speech and civil society.
Creative Commons photo via Flickr user fotograzio (https://www.flickr.com/photos/fotograzio/23587980033/in/photolist-BWoyEV-9sXJor-65C6vW-6HoVLi-CniMF-6Nmu25-a2vLRE-8EjbLa-5oemP4-2WnPir-68wN7D-qUAEUo-5WMdZy-CniTa-7SRuk-8wuiLW-ngSxx-auStar-7hHVm2-wZdZ-8WxYa6-6sHDJQ-8jMspN-fuEUnL-7F4sHR-npc6W-ngSz2-5YcUcm-oD777V-gyXGQj-9YzJSh-7A3qBq-gyXGYW-7mxD65-UnAYc-nsSXr-UnAHZ-oB5nAs-oD5sv1-omBFNa-BZRnk-4eugbA-4Mm6sa-4Mqh55-4Mqhju-4ikSHh-7RcGHj-6GAFVT-eApV5g-PgHJU)
Find out more about this episode here: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/99495
"George Lucas built a whole new industry with Star Wars." says Peter S. Menell, devoted science fiction fan and a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law, who studies copyright and intellectual property law. "But what funds that remarkable company is their ways of using copyright."
And he's right. A third of the profits LucasFilm pulls in from Star Wars has come from merchandising alone (http://www.forbes.com/sites/aswathdamodaran/2016/01/06/intergalactic-finance-how-much-is-the-star-wars-franchise-worth-to-disney/#74c6181b2d79). Not ticket sales, not DVDs, not video games or books. Toys, clothes, and weird tie-ins like tauntaun sleeping bags and wookie hair conditioner.
But fans of Star Wars, and other stratospherically profitable creative universes, increasingly like to become creators within those universes. They write books, they make costumes, they direct spinoffs and upload them to YouTube.
And sometimes they make money.
How does law come into play when fans start to reinterpret intellectual property? We sat down with Menell to see where the tensions lie between the law, the courts, and the George Lucases of the world.
Creative Commons music used in this episode: David Szesztay “Morning One” Broke For Free “Something Elated”
Image courtesy of Flickr user: kalexanderson https://flic.kr/p/b7YWCD
Subscribe to us on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/radio-berkman/id298096088?mt=2
In her article "The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens," Elspeth Reeve tells the stories of some of Tumblr's most popular bloggers -kids who started their blogs in high school, made a ton of money and then inexplicably disappeared.
In this episode we talk to Reeve about what she discovered when she went looking for these teens and what that can tell you about Tumblr and the teenage child stars of the Internet.
Read Reeve's article here: https://newrepublic.com/article/129002/secret-lives-tumblr-teens
Credits: Produced by Daniel Dennis Jones and Elizabeth Gillis Music by Dave Depper ("Rare Groove," "Sharpie," "Heartstrings"), Podington Bear ("Golden Hour") and Anitek ("Beta Blocker")
An artist, musician, or writer can’t just take another person's creation and claim it as their own. Federal law outlines how creators can and can’t borrow from each other. These rules are collectively called "copyright law," and essentially they give creators the exclusive right to copy, modify, distribute, perform, and display their creative works.
Copyright law was originally created as an incentive. If creators aren’t worrying about whether someone might steal their work, they’re more likely to share their ideas with the public. This kind of sharing in turn helps to create more ideas, products, jobs, art, and whole industries.
But even with copyright there are exceptions, or times where another artist can use a copyrighted work within getting the copyright holder’s permission. This safe zone is called "Fair Use."
On this episode of the podcast we'll tell you everything you need to know about Fair Use in 6 minutes!
Reference Section Photo courtesy of Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week Music courtesy of “Beta Blocker” -Anitek This week's episode was written by Leo Angelakos, Elizabeth Gillis, Daniel Dennis Jones, and Olga Slobodyanyuk, and edited by Elizabeth Gillis. Visit http://www.fairuseweek.org for even more information and resources on Fair Use Visit http://dlrp.berkman.harvard.edu/ for information on how to incorporate digital resources and fair use friendly practices in classrooms
Special thanks this week to Andres Lombana-Bermudez of the Youth & Media Team, and Chris Bavitz of the Cyberlaw Clinic.
For more information on this episode, including a transcript, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu
Are you really "you" online?
We asked around for stories of digital alter egos — secret identities that people maintain on the web and try to keep separate from their real life identities.
And it turns out there are lots of reasons — some good, some nefarious, some maybe both — to have an alternate persona online.
On this episode we share stories of Catfishers, sock puppets, and digital doppelgangers.
Reference Section Photo courtesy of carbonnyc Music courtesy of Podington Bear, MCJackinthebox, Blue Dot Sessions, and David Szesztay
This week's episode produced by Daniel Dennis Jones and Elizabeth Gillis, with oversight from Gretchen Weber, and extra help from Adam Holland, Tiffany Lin, Rebekah Heacock Jones, Annie Pruitt, and Carey Andersen.
More info on this story here: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/99359
You've likely heard of Silk Road - the black market e-commerce hub that was shutdown in 2013 for becoming a magnet for vendors of illicit goods. But the story of its shutdown, and the investigation and trial that followed, is complicated enough that we need a guide.
On this week's podcast Berkman Affiliate Hasit Shah brought together members of the Berkman community to speak with journalist and legal expert Sarah Jeong about what it was like to follow the Silk Road trial, and how the justice system copes when technology becomes a central part of a case.
Listeners: We need your stories! Was there ever a time you used the web to be anonymous? Have you ever had a digital alter ego? If you’ve ever used a blog or a social media account to do something you didn't want connected to your real identity, we want to hear about it! We’ve set up a special hotline. All you have to do is call-in and tell your story on our voicemail, and we'll feature you on an upcoming episode. (617) 682-0376.
On your computer, you don’t ever really "take out the trash." Data doesn’t get picked up by a garbage truck. It doesn’t decompose in a landfill.
It just accumulates.
And because space is becoming less and less of an issue -- hard drive space keeps getting cheaper, and a lot of the apps we use have cloud storage anyway -- deleting our files is a thing of the past.
We become Digital Hoarders.
But what happens when we dig up those old files from years ago? Those old emails from our boyfriend or girlfriend, those old digital photos of family, those long rambling journal entries?
On this week's podcast we talk to three researchers who all have different stories of digital hoarding, deleting, and recovering.
Jack Cushman, Judith Donath, and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger talk about the value of remembering, the value of forgetting, and what we trust to our machines.
More information on this episode, including links and credits, here: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/99207
Facebook has had a lot of trouble with misogynistic speech. A few years ago, several women’s groups joined together to petition Facebook to work harder to block misogynistic pages, posts, and replies. At the time Facebook had strict standards against hate speech that was racist or anti-semitic — such speech would be blocked or taken down. These groups simply asked that gendered hate speech receive the same treatment.
It was ironic, people said, that Facebook would commonly take down photos of women breastfeeding in response to complaints. Such content was deemed pornographic. But when Facebook users complained about comments that were misogynistic or harassing women, Facebook defended their decisions not to take them down. Their reasoning was one of semantics: Comments that described gendered violence didn’t actually threaten violence, they would argue. But — campaigners pointed out — misogynistic content actually is threatening, and creates an unsafe environment for speech.
The campaigners won. But this isn’t the first time Facebook’s policies on censorship have been questioned by the public. And it won’t be the last.
Right now, many European countries are asking Facebook to more strictly police hate speech on the platform.
Jillian York is a writer and the director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She joined us to talk about the most recent debates about online speech, and why she questions whether these kinds of decisions should be left up to Facebook at all.
Find more information on this episode, and subscribe to the podcast, here: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/99190
A recent New York Times survey of the top 50 news sites showed that blocking ads while surfing their mobile news sites could save up to 14 megabytes per page loaded. 14 megabytes adds up to 30 seconds over 4G, and, if you’re on a restricted data plan, it would cost you 30 cents per page, all of that money going to your mobile provider, not to the content publisher.
But for content publishers, and the ad providers that keep them alive, ad blocking poses a huge problem. Most of the commercial web as we know it exists because of advertising. When web users aren’t loading ads on their favorite ad-supported site, or otherwise paying the site - by subscribing, sponsoring, buying merchandise - the site is losing out on cash.
And we’re talking serious cash. Digital ad spending is expected to reach $170.17 billion in 2015, with $69 billion - 40% of ad spending - in the mobile space.
That’s a lot of money to spend on ads that might not even be seen. Ad block software is now in use by 200 million people around the globe.
Doc Searls is a journalist and author who worked in the ad industry years ago. He has referred to ad blocking as “the biggest boycott in human history.”
Radio Berkman producer Elizabeth Gillis spoke with Searls about what’s going on in the Ad Block Wars, and the part played by users, like you.
More info on this episode, including links and credits, here: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/99177
The current generation of search engines just tells you where to find information (returns a list of webpages). The next generation of search engines could anticipate what you are searching for, and actually find the information for you.
In this conversation, Cynthia Rudin — associate professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Prediction Analysis Lab — leads a brainstorming session to envision the future of the search engine.
Challenges for the audience: * What are some cases where Google fails miserably? * Do you sometimes want to find the answer to a complicated type of question? How do you envision the answer being presented? * Do you have ideas of what the capabilities will be for the next generation of search engines? * What are some lessons we can learn from search engines from the past? This will be mainly audience participation.
More information on this event here: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/99130
Ethnographer Whitney Phillips embedded with the trolls of 4chan, observing for years how anonymous members of its subversive "b" forum memed, pranked, harassed, and abused, all for the "lolz" — the thrill of doing something shocking.
The result: a book, "This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture," that sheds light on how and why trolls do what they do.
More than pushing the boundaries of taste within themselves — the "b" board recently made headlines for a case in which anonymous members allegedly goaded one of their own to cut off his own toe — troll behavior has had an incredibly broad impact on society. Trolling shaped the way social platforms and conversations on public forums take place. It is in no small part due to the spread of troll culture that comments sections, Facebook threads, and Twitter conversations can be minefields to productive conversation; the troll dialect is better equipped for shock and ironic bigotry than for sincerity, and a sincere conversation is just begging to be disrupted, especially when you disagree with your target.
But while wrench-throwing can and has been a very important tool in online discourse, the web has started to outgrow trolls. In 2003 when 4chan was launched, there were under 700 million people on the Internet (predominantly higher income, younger, white, Western, male, and native English speakers), compared to 3.2 billion people today from many backgrounds. The incredible diversity of individuals all trying to have conversations on the same platforms has increased demand for civility, understanding, and inclusiveness, even as the conversations can seem more and more cacophonously problematic. And this threatens to make trolling less funny.
Whitney joins us this week to talk about how troll culture has changed over the years, and what platforms can do to temper darker forms of discourse.
For more on this week's episode visit: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/99117
Bitcoin is having its 7th birthday, and its promise to change the way the world thinks about money is looking less and less hyperbolic.
For one, the block chain technology underlying Bitcoin - the public ledger that makes the exchange transparent and accountable - is now being used to clean up Wall Street. A block chain-inspired service announced recently could open up the practice of lending stocks, and help prevent the kind of out-of-control short selling that led to the crash of 2008.
But there are a lot people still don't understand about Bitcoin and block chain. We spoke with incoming Berkman Fellow Patrick Murck of the Bitcoin Foundation to explain.
Flickr photo courtesy of btckeychain
Our full interview with Damon Krukowski referenced in this episode: https://soundcloud.com/radioberkman/pay-the-musician
The market for recorded music has undergone at least three major reinventions since the dawn of the Internet. At the turn of the century illegal downloading ate away at the music industry’s bottom line. Then the iTunes music store made it easy to buy music again, albeit disaggregated from its album form.
Then along came streaming. The combination of ubiquitous Internet connectivity and bottomless consumer appetite for music has led to the success of applications like Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio which allow users to access entire music catalogs from virtually anywhere for next to nothing.
Streaming has worked. In 2014 alone, at least 164 billion tracks were played across all streaming services according to Nielsen. And these streaming companies are raking in incredible amounts of cash from advertising and user subscription fees.
Where does the money go? A recent study from Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship showed that 20 to 50 percent of music revenues might never make it to their rightful owners. In some cases artists might get 20% or less of the already tiny dollar amounts coming in from streaming services.
But no one knows for sure.
In a New York Times Op-Ed this week David Byrne asked the music industry to “open the black box,” and let everyone - the artists, the labels, the distributors, the listeners - know exactly where your money goes.
On this week’s episode of the podcast we try to find out if we can crack into the stream and figure out where the money is flowing.
CC photo courtesy of Flickr user hobvias sudoneighm
Find a transcript of this episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b_vhqKu3OVVOOPddj64HZLQthe5k4pzinsF5XmYpJ7M/edit?usp=sharing
With 316 million users posting 500 million tweets a day, someone is bound to write an unoriginal tweet now and then.
But there are some Twitter users whose entire existence relies completely on plagiarizing tiny jokes and relatable observations created by other Twitter users. Many plagiarizing accounts have follower numbers ranging from the thousands to the millions. Meaning their exposure can lead to career opportunities and sponsorships built on the creativity of others who are just getting started in their writing careers.
So it was not without excitement that Twitter users found out last week that they can report plagiarizing accounts to Twitter under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and have these copied tweets removed.
But now we're forced to ask the question: are jokes protected under copyright?
We asked Andy Sellars of Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic to weigh in.
Flickr photo courtesy of wwworks Music from Podington Bear "Bright White
Reddit is sometimes called "the frontpage of the Internet." 170 million people a month help upload, curate, and make viral the cat photos, prank videos, and topical discussions that help fuel our neverending thirst for content.
But recent moves by Reddit management to tighten up their content policy have threatened what is seen as the fundamentally "free speech" culture at Reddit.
David Weinberger and Adrienne Debigare recently wrote about Reddit's crossroads for the Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2015/07/how-reddit-the-business-lost-touch-with-reddit-the-culture).
They joined us this week to talk about the culture of Reddit, free speech, and just who gets to make these decisions anyway?
Flickr photo courtesy of fibonacciblue Music from Neurowaxx and Timo Timonen
Why are over 450 towns in the US building their own high speed Internet networks?
Let's look at the example of the small town of Holyoke, Massachusetts.
A few years back the town's mayor asked if the local cable or telephone companies wanted to build a fiber network to serve local schools and municipal buildings. The companies declined. The project was turned over to the local gas and electric utility, HG&E. Eighteen years later, HG&E have expanded this network to serve local businesses, and even other towns in the area. And it turns out this investment has more than paid for itself.
On this week's episode we talk about what happens when municipal utilities and companies compete to provide local Internet services.
Find out more about this story here: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/98962
Public spaces function based on a varying give-and-take relationship with community members. Publicly supported media -- whether it be college radio, a local NPR station, cable access, or PBS -- shares the word "public," but traditionally doesn’t have the same relationship with members as other "public" institutions, for examples parks and libraries.
On this episode of Radio Berkman we speak with Nieman Fellow Melody Kramer who is researching what it means to be a member of a public or community radio station. Kramer pulls from examples at stations all over the country of people supporting their public radio stations in non-financial ways, including code and story ideas.
You can see some of what she’s uncovered on her github.
The International Labour Organization estimates that between forced labor and the commercial sex trade, more than 20 million men, women, and children are being trafficked internationally.
The web plays a huge role in keeping trafficking industries viable, but new technology is also contributing to the efforts to police and prevent human trafficking and the child exploitation that results from it.
As a PhD student in MIT’s HASTS program, Mitali Thakor is studying the problems associated with a tangled web of different institutions and companies trying to solve these problems. Thakor points to questions of surveillance and the rights of youth online in her discussion with Radio Berkman producer Elizabeth Gillis.
The more comfortable we get using digital platforms the more important it becomes to understand our relationships to them. From Facebook, to Fitbit, to Wikipedia, to networked games, and even to our schools and employers, the more we entrust our data to an outside platform, the more we have to ask the question: "How are they accountable to us?"
For this week's podcast we spoke to four PhD candidates who are working with Microsoft Research. First, Ifeoma Ajunwa explains the tricky employers use big data collected from their employees. Then, Aleena Chia describes the unique system of governance that’s formed around the digital gaming world of Eve Online. Next, Berkman fellow Nathan Matias addresses the nuanced relationship between users and platforms where users create the content, like Wikipedia and Reddit. Finally, we speak with Stacey Blasiola about her research topic, “Newsfeed: Created by you?”
You may be familiar with a typical hack-day or hack-a-thon. Throw a group of developers and creators in a conference room for the weekend, and they'll come up with some amazing app or product to make life better for all of humankind.
Radio Berkman recently stumbled on a hack-a-thon that turns hack-a-thons on their head. Last year a traveling event called Comedy Hack Day visited the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Run by a group called Cultivated Wit, the goal of the hack day is to bring some laughs to the world of tech entrepreneurship. Instead of trying to attract millions of dollars in venture capital, they're bringing comedians and developers together to create prank inventions, satirical sites, and smart phone apps to poke fun at our increasingly tech-obsessed world.
A lot of personal information about you is completely invisible, intangible, and racing around cyberspace on a mission to pay your bills and geolocate your Facebook status. And, of course, this is useful and in a lot of ways really cool.
But today on Radio Berkman we’re going to talk about the obstacles presented by a data-driven society. How can we keep mountains of information out of the wrong hands without compromising all the great benefits we get everyday?
First, we talk to Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center and the author of Data and Goliath, The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World. In this book, Schneier notes that the bulk collection of data isn’t going away, but changes in policy and public perception could allow citizens to have more control over how this information gets used.
And in the second half of the show we talk to Josephine Wolff, who is also a Berkman Fellow and PhD candidate in the Engineering Systems Division at MIT studying cybersecurity and Internet policy. If you were concerned by the major credit card or email breaches of the last few years, you’ll want to hear this.
Credits for this episode here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2015/06/08/radio-berkman-218-the-threats-and-tradeoffs-of-big-data/
Few sectors of the networked environment get a worse reputation for hate speech than online gaming. Competitive games with chat functions have always involved some level of trash talking. Slurs, shaming, and casual threats are part of the players' toolkit for riling up their opponent.
But the toxicity levels of video game forums have reached a dangerous point. Unregulated and unchecked, many gaming networks have become zones where cyberbullying, misogyny, racism, and homophobic language are the norm.
At least one gaming company has decided that this behavior should NOT be the norm. In 2012, Riot Games - makers of the insanely popular League of Legends (over 60 million players around the world) - hired a cognitive neuroscientist named Jeffrey "Lyte" Lin to "game" the game. Jeffrey is in charge of building social systems that de-incentivize bad behavior and bring about a more sportsman-like culture.
On today's episode, we talk to Jeffrey about what the web can learn from how games are fighting hate speech.
This is the first episode in a series on hate speech online. If you have any comments, or suggestions for future guests and topics, leave us a note in the comments, or send us a tweet!
In Radio Berkman 216 we tackle the web as we know it in 2014-2015. Hate speech online, freedom of speech online, censorship and surveillance online, and, of course, whether our smart machines are out to destroy us.
All of these stories and more are part of this year's Internet Monitor report (https://thenetmonitor.org/research/2014), a collection of dozens of essays that track how we are changing the web and how the web is changing us.
This episode's guests include: • Andy Sellars, author of "SOPA Lives: Copyright’s Existing Power to Block Websites and 'Break the Internet'" (http://medium.com/internet-monitor-2014-platforms-and-policy/sopa-lives-copyrights-existing-power-to-block-websites-and-break-the-internet-5b5a76ec6ff5) • Susan Benesch, author of "Flower Speech: New Responses to Hatred Online" (https://medium.com/internet-monitor-2014-public-discourse/flower-speech-new-responses-to-hatred-online-d98bf67735b7) • Nathan Freitas, author of "The Great Firewall Welcomes You!" (https://medium.com/internet-monitor-2014-international-issues/the-great-firewall-welcomes-you-c58e366def6b) • Sara Watson, author of "Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things" (https://medium.com/message/dada-data-and-the-internet-of-paternalistic-things-7bb4321d35c4) • David Michel Davies, of the Webby Awards on their recent report "Understanding the Sky-High Demands of the World’s Most Entitled Consumer" (http://www.slideshare.net/TheWebbyAwards/at-your-service-the-webby-awards)
We also mentioned: • Randall Munroe's XKCD chart "Stories of the Past & Future" (http://xkcd.com/1491/)
This episode features Creative Commons Music from: Berdan Chad Crouch (http://podingtonbear.com/) Learning Music Monthly (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Learning_Music/An_End_Like_This/04_Ovulation) Timo Timonen (https://soundcloud.com/timotimonen/timo-timonen-shadow)
Not long ago, illegally downloading a movie could land you in court facing millions of dollars in fines and jailtime. But Hollywood has begun to weather the storm by offering alternatives to piracy — same day digital releases, better streaming, higher quality in-theater experiences — that help meet some of the consumer demand that piracy captured. But the porn industry is not Hollywood. While the web has created incredible new economic opportunities for adult entertainers — independent production has flourished, as well as new types of production, which we won’t go into here simply to preserve our G-rating — few other industries on the web face the glut of competition from services that offer similar content for free or in violation of copyright. Simply put, there’s so much free porn on the net that honest pornographers can’t keep up. It’s hard to get accurate numbers on how much revenue is generated from online porn. It’s believed to be in the billions, at least in the United States. But it’s even more difficult to get a picture of how much revenue is lost in the adult entertainment industry due to copyright violation. Surprisingly though, the porn industry doesn’t seem that interested in pursuing copyright violators. Intellectual property scholar Kate Darling studied how the industry was responding to piracy, and it turned out that — by and large — adult entertainment creators ran the numbers and found that it simply cost more from them to fight copyright violators than it was worth. For today’s episode, Berkman alum and journalist Leora Kornfeld sat down with Kate Darling to talk to her about how porn producers are losing the copyright battle, and why many don’t care.
Not long ago, illegally downloading a movie could land you in court facing millions of dollars in fines and jailtime. But Hollywood has begun to weather the storm by offering alternatives to piracy — same day digital releases, better streaming, higher quality in-theater experiences — that help meet some of the consumer demand that piracy captured. But the porn industry is not Hollywood. While the web has created incredible new economic opportunities for adult entertainers — independent production has flourished, as well as new types of production, which we won’t go into here simply to preserve our G-rating — few other industries on the web face the glut of competition from services that offer similar content for free or in violation of copyright. Simply put, there’s so much free porn on the net that honest pornographers can’t keep up. It’s hard to get accurate numbers on how much revenue is generated from online porn. It’s believed to be in the billions, at least in the United States. But it’s even more difficult to get a picture of how much revenue is lost in the adult entertainment industry due to copyright violation. Surprisingly though, the porn industry doesn’t seem that interested in pursuing copyright violators. Intellectual property scholar Kate Darling studied how the industry was responding to piracy, and it turned out that — by and large — adult entertainment creators ran the numbers and found that it simply cost more from them to fight copyright violators than it was worth. For today’s episode, Berkman alum and journalist Leora Kornfeld sat down with Kate Darling to talk to her about how porn producers are losing the copyright battle, and why many don’t care.
Most of the spectrum of frequency that exists in the US is occupied or owned by large wireless corporations, cable companies, by the government. But at least one small chunk of spectrum — “low-band spectrum” wireless, or TV white spaces (so-called because it is the space between the television dials) — has been somewhat open to the public. There are thousands of devices on the market that take advantage of this spectrum without paying a license fee, allowing consumers to transmit bits without interference from walls, trees, or radiation from devices like microwaves. But the Federal Communications Commission is now deciding whether to auction off this spectrum to the highest bidder, putting at risk not only billions of dollars in economic activity, but also very fundamental concepts of affordable public access to information spaces. And on May 15th, just a couple days away from this podcast, the FCC will be holding an open meeting to discuss whether auctioning off this spectrum would be a good idea. Harold Feld, senior vice president for Public Knowledge, recently sat down with David Weinberger to talk about why we should be concerned about auctioning off this spectrum.
In January of 2012 a British mathematician posted a humble invitation on his blog for fellow academics and researchers to join him in boycotting the prestigious research publisher Elsevier. Citing high prices, exploitative bundling practices, and lobbying efforts to prevent open access to research, the mathematician publicly denounced Elsevier and refused to do business with them in the future. Eighteen months later almost 14,000 researchers have joined the boycott of Elsevier, kicking off what’s been referred to as the Academic Spring movement. But despite the effort, closed academic journals continue to be a frustration for professors and researchers in the digital age. Alternatives to closed journals are becoming more common, but growth is slow, and some fields are more welcoming to open access than others. Enter Academia.edu, a topic agnostic platform for researchers to share their work, connect with peers, and present an entire corpus of their research, completely open and completely free. Today’s guest Richard Price launched Academia.edu after encountering his own frustrations with the world of closed publishing as a student and researcher of philosophy. He recently spoke with David Weinberger about how the platform is facing up against for-profit journals.
Revelations of the NSA’s data surveillance efforts have raised serious questions about the ethics and necessity of violating privacy that have been bubbling under the surface for some time. Efforts to monitor communication are nothing new, but electronically mediated communication has increased the amount of information being shared, and the possibilities for eavesdropping are endless. But there’s a trade off. People tolerate incursions into privacy for greater security or even convenience: health care, transportation, public safety, or any number of web utilities we use on a daily basis. Bruce Schneier is an author, Berkman fellow, and security technologist. He recently sat down with David Weinberger to talk about the positives and perils of privacy violation.
As high school and college students transition into a knowledge economy they face both advantages and challenges with how they find information and engage with co-workers as teammates. As a recent study of US employers and recent college graduates discovered, some young hires are pretty good at finding out information online and through social networks, but experience significant difficulty with traditional methods of finding answers — going through bound reports, picking up the phone, or researching with groups. The study, How College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the Workplace, was conducted by Project Information Literacy, and part of a series of studies supported by the Berkman Center and the Institute for Museum and Library Services to discover how research behavior is changing. David Weinberger spoke with Berkman Fellow and director of Project Information Literacy Alison Head about her research.
What if you could witness a crime taking place from space, and even step in to prevent it? A group of researchers at Harvard’s Humanitarian Initiative are trying to do exactly that. As the nation of Sudan faced a complex crisis — a secession of the southern region that threatened to boil over into a civil war in 2011 — Nathaniel Raymond and his team at The Signal Program were carefully monitoring the conflict. Their methods were uncommon. Using donated satellite imagery — the kind normally used to observe environmental conditions or create maps — the team tracked the movements of troops, military vehicles, and resources in near real-time, and used that information to alert humanitarian groups on the ground. But it’s a process fraught with challenges, from imperfect imagery (imagine a cloud passing by just as you’re trying to spot tank movements), to the ethical questions that come with intervening in a conflict remotely. So how does a group of civilians at Harvard go about monitoring an unfolding humanitarian disaster from space? Our producer Frances Harlow spent a day with the team at the Signal Program to find out how they work.
How have politically engaged organizations used the web to fundamentally change how people organize and engage politically? Why are left wing organizations more likely to succeed in organization online? Why are conservatives less funny than liberals? David Karpf chronicles the dozens of Netroots political organizations, both progressive and conservative, that have sprouted up with the mass adoption of the internet in his new book The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. On this 2012 election-themed episode of Radio Berkman he speaks with our host David Weinberger about how these organizations are having an impact on politics.
The Internet exists and persists on the border between helpful and harmful, between freedom and totalitarianism, access to knowledge and censorship. But as long as technology is adaptable activists will be learning and creating workarounds to spread information and promote change. Enter the Circumvention Tools Hackfest, a four-day bonanza of coders and freedom lovers gathered together to build and improve applications to help activists in repressive regimes get around censorship and surveillance. Correspondent Becky Kazansky attended the Hackfest to find out what kind of tools these “hackers” cooked up. As part of our new series — Drone Humanitarianism: Harnessing Technology to Remotely Solve and Prevent Crisis — she filed this report.
Disseminating knowledge was once a costly undertaking. The expenses of printing, distributing, and housing the work of researchers and scholars left most research in the hands of publishers, journals, and institutions in a system that has evolved over centuries. And the licensing model that has arisen with that system butts heads with the quick, simple, and virtually free distribution system of the net. The key to breaking free of the traditional licensing model locking up research is the promise of the “Open Access” movement. And the movement has already made significant strides. Over the summer the United Kingdom was enticed enough by the potential for greater innovation and growth of knowledge to propose Open Access for any research supported by government funds. But Open Access still remains a wonky, hard to understand subject. Today, Peter Suber — Director of the Harvard Open Access Project — shares insights with David Weinberger from his new guide to distilling Open Access, called simply Open Access.
Nobel Laureate and Economist Elinor Ostrom passed away last month at the age of 78. Best recognized for her research into the management of common pool resources, Ostrom broke new ground with her findings that Commons were not inherently tragic, as previous generations of economists believed. In fact, Ostrom found examples of communities that could effectively manage limited resources, like agricultural land or open space, to prevent resource depletion. Her work paved the way for researchers studying internet communities to explore how norms are established and cooperation is achieved. On today’s show Berkman researchers and affiliates Benjamin Mako Hill, Judith Donath, Mayo Fuster Morell, and Oliver Goodenough discuss how Ostrom’s work impacted their lives.
If you’ve ever experienced the problem of a dead cell phone battery and only incompatible chargers within reach, you’ve experienced one of the minor frustrations of a non-interoperable system. This frustration — not to mention the environmental waste of having dozens of different charger types for the same class of device — has led some countries to institute regulations for cell phone manufacturers to use a single common standard. Such a structure is an example of an Interoperable System. And interoperable systems can range anywhere from relatively minor markets like mobile phone chargers, to massive infrastructures like smart energy grids or air traffic systems. Friends of the show John Palfrey and Urs Gasser are the authors of the newly released Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems. They spoke with David Weinberger about how Interoperability works, and how interoperable systems can lead to greater innovation, greater efficiency, and better functioning societies.
Lots of digital ink has been spilled about how and whether digital technology played a critical role in bringing about the Arab Spring. But it’s been 18 months since the spark of revolution was first lit in Tunisia, way back in December of 2010. How has digital technology played a role in laying the foundation for a stable Tunisia? Today’s guests were tasked with finding an answer to that question. And it turns out to be a very complex and interesting one, leading them to explore Tunisia’s communications infrastructure, Tunisia’s digital economy, and an increasingly technology-enabled civil society. Zack Brisson and Kate Krontiris of Reboot are the authors of the recently completed TUNISIA: FROM REVOLUTIONS TO INSTITUTIONS.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — a U.S. House bill that would give the Department of Justice the authority to demand that ISPs block sites accused of hosting pirated content — seemed to be doing well. Nearly half of the Senate sponsored similar legislation that survived a committee vote. And people weren’t generally making a big deal about it. But on the week before Thanksgiving SOPA suddenly hit the front page after a particularly fraught House committee hearing on the bill. Battle lines became clear. Representatives of big content owners like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) partnered with big brands and the US Chamber of Commerce in support of the legislation, saying it would protect millions of jobs. On the other side web entrepreneurs like Google, Twitter, and Facebook sided with Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the bill, saying it would basically give corporations a legal path to censor any site that poses a competitive threat. And now it looks like the bill might have a harder time than legislators originally thought. But talk to the creators of intellectual property one on one and you’ll see that many don’t have a clear opinion on the bill. The open web has benefitted the work of artists, coders, and researchers alike, allowing them to share their work with new audiences and experiment with new business models for next to nothing. But many creators see that same technology as stealing food from their mouths when their work appears on torrent sites and uncredited on blogs. We spoke with two people this week to help get our heads straight on SOPA. The graphic artist Jim “Zub” Zubkavich worries about what piracy is doing to his career, but sees SOPA as a little draconian. And Julian Sanchez of the CATO Institute gives some idea of what SOPA will do if implemented, and the chance it might have of passing.
2011 has been a big year for quintuple threat actor/writer/comedian/rapper Donald Glover. For the last decade he released rap, remixes, and mixtapes on the web completely for free under the names Childish Gambino and MC DJ. Not just free of charge, but free of any kind of copyright notice or license. But over the summer Glover, now picking up notice for his smart rhymes, instrumentally organic sound, and indie sensibility, got signed to Glassnote records, home to big indie acts like Mumford and Sons and Phoenix, and has been hard at work touring, and preparing for the release of his first “for pay” album CAMP. Earlier this year we caught up with Donald to talk about where his musical inspiration comes from, and how he feels about the explosion of free music on the web.
Video games aren’t just, well, fun and games. When you pop open a video game — be it Farmville on Facebook for your smartphone or World of Warcraft on your $10,000 immersive gaming setup — you are entering into any number of different terms and conditions agreements about behavior and property that govern your playtime. But questions have started to arise as more and more games build the concept of virtual property into their play. New powers, levels, avatars, privileges — who do those things belong to, and under what jurisdiction do they fall? Greg Lastowka is a professor of law at Rutgers University and author of the book Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds. Lastowka has given a great deal of thought to the virtual worlds of video games, and documented some of the cases where the laws of the game and the laws of real life clash, sometimes violently.
What would a digital version of your public library look like? There’s more to it than e-books and digital reading devices. Librarians, scholars, innovators, and techno-wizards are collaborating under the mantle of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to build a next generation public library. Such a thing could incorporate one or more of many different elements: a set of physical buildings; a purely digital archive with an open API layer for coders to play around with; a full fledged digital lending library. And when the DPLA converge on the National Archives in Washington, DC this Friday (you can check out the agenda and tune in to a livestream here) they’ll get to work out just a few of those ideas. Today, a special report from Benjamin Naddaf-Hafrey who spoke to a few of the minds behind the DPLA.
It’s time to stop thinking about intellectual property as something purely for your legal counsel to deal with. That’s the driving idea behind John Palfrey’s aptly titled new book Intellectual Property Strategy. Companies and institutions that have to worry about creative works, trademarks, or brands would be well-suited, Palfrey says, to seize the sword and shield from the attorneys (who tend to be aggressive and/or defensive about IP) and exercise a little more flexibility and creativity with intellectual property on their own. Palfrey sat down with David Weinberger for this week’s Radio Berkman to talk about why.
Are human beings — as consultants, researchers, and the authors of business books have thought for years — fundamentally motivated by self interest? Or is there a deeper cooperative instinct that drives us to work? Those are the questions that fuel Yochai Benkler‘s investigation in The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest. In it Benkler challenges the rather embarrassing idea that people are primarily selfish by citing examples — from collective farming to neuroscience to the world’s richest corporations — demonstrating that people are a lot more cooperative than they get credit for. Benkler spoke with David Weinberger about his new book for this week’s Radio Berkman.
“Wikileaks” has become something of a neverending story. Coverage has branched out beyond the revelations of the documents allegedly leaked by Pfc. Bradley Manning in 2010, and on to ancillary territory: the flamboyant presence of founder Julian Assange; the legal propriety of Wikileaks’ actions; and the harsh treatment of Manning as a military detainee. These last two areas have garnered the attention of today’s guest. Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler recently co-authored a joint letter condemning the abuse of Bradley Manning that has since been signed by 295 scholars in the legal realm. He has also spoken out against efforts by government and private entities to stifle Wikileaks. While some have argued that facilitating the release of classified documents is unprecedented and perhaps illegal, Benkler has insisted that Wikileaks’ behavior is not only entirely constitutional, but also not exceptional. Moreover, he says, the private and governmental response to Wikileaks demonstrates an interesting insight into how networks do battle in the digital age. We sat down with Benkler this week to hear why.
In our last episode we talked about how artists can feel besieged from all sides. Fans, promoters, labels — when you’re talented and famous everyone wants a piece of you. Today’s guest is one of the most important people in a musician’s life. He’s the guy that keeps the vultures at bay, and makes sure the artists can focus on their music. He is The Manager. Michael McDonald is the founder of the boutique artist management company Mick Management, home to artists like Brett Dennen and Ray LaMontagne. One of Michael’s most popular artists, John Mayer, has gone from a small-time musician with a street team to a multi-platinum artist with an amazing fan interaction on twitter. John Mayer later abandoned Twitter (and nearly 4 million followers) when he decided it was too limiting. Michael talked with us about how artists experiment with promotion and social media (sometimes with mixed results), and how managers help deal with the demands placed on artists.
Musicians often feel besieged on all sides. Promoters, labels, publishers, radio stations, and venues can make an artist feel exploited and overwhelmed. But in the digital age it might feel like fans and fellow musicians are taking a bite out of them, too. Second to piracy the phenomenon of fan created content is the greatest irritation to professional musicians and their stakeholders. From the upload of a song to YouTube (which involves almost no creative effort) to sampling, remixing or creating a fan-made music video — many artists feel fan initiatives show disrespect for their rights. And some are using the tools of PR and the law to make their voices heard. Jay Rosenthal is the General Counsel for the National Music Publishers’ Association with decades of experience working with music industry organizations on the legal side, and representing artists like Salt n Pepa, Thievery Corporation, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. We talked about professional musicianship, and what kind of threat sampling and remix projects (like Girl Talk’s “All Day” and DJ Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album”) pose to the music industry.
The story of Google’s rise to prominence is one of consistently radical innovation. In the 1990s Google reinvented the model of the search engine — transforming it to an algorithmically-driven ranking system — and online advertising — making it possible for anyone to be an advertiser or advertisement host. Since then Google has taken on and dominated almost every other sector of the web by taking advantage of — and in many ways building — some of the web’s greatest assets: speed, openness, and ability to take risks and experiment. That’s according to Steven Levy, author of the new book In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. But the story of Google is not just one of innovation. It’s a coming of age story in which a young, idealistic startup is confronted with the harsh realities of growing into the world’s third largest tech company: antitrust investigations, lawsuits, and a particularly tense standoff with the leadership of the largest country in the world. Steven Levy is a senior writer for Wired Magazine, and he joins us today to talk about his new best-selling profile of Google.
From the wax cylinder to the MP3 tracking global trends in music has changed a great deal over time. In 1933, the Lomax family of ethnomusicologists and folklorists traipsed around the world with a 315-pound phonograph recorder to collect the music and stories of dozens of cultures. Today, it might be more useful to fire up YouTube or MySpace to see what bubbles up. But the digital music revolution has also made it easier for music to cross boundaries, for trends to spread, intermingle, and evolve much faster than ever before. And musical recordings, along with many of the tools used to share and create music online have often been victim to the impermanence of the web, making the job of the modern ethnomusicologist harder than ever. Ethan Zuckerman sat down with one such ethnomusicologist, Wayne Marshall — a blogger, DJ, and post-doctoral scholar at MIT working on a book about global youth culture and digital music — to talk about his work.
Strike another entry off the list of things robots CAN’T do. Geeks competed this past winter in Socialbots 2011 to create robots capable of forming relationships on Twitter in a competition organized by Tim Hwang and the Web Ecology Project. The winning bot was the one who could gain the most followers and have the most 140 character conversations with other human beings without intervention. And the bots actually WORKED. The real world applications for such technology are endless — non-profits, activist groups, e-commerce, the military — all could benefit from artificial intelligence to infiltrate social networks. And might be already…
Did you ever wonder how artists become rock stars? Sure, talent is a big part of it. But behind almost every successful musician — from the platinum selling pop idol to the quirky regional artist who only sells records by the handful — you’ll probably find at least one person, if not a team of people working hard to make sure the business side of the music business stays going. And if you think that’s changed with the digital revolution, you’d be surprised. Sure, technology has made the recording process easier, and artists can connect directly with fans and promote shows easily through the web. But putting together a hit and sharing it with the world is hardly a solo effort. Today we sit down with two of the folks who help keep the music flowing. “Big” Jon Platt is President of EMI Music Publishing’s North American creative team, and responsible for signing Jay-Z among countless other chart-topping artists. Kim Buie is the Vice President of A&R for Lost Highway records out of Nashville, the home of artists like Lucinda Williams, Willie Nelson, and Tom Jones.
In recent months citizens of the Middle East and North Africa have experienced widespread shutdowns of internet access, coinciding with revolutions to overthrow national leadership. The seeming ease with which the Internet has been silenced in Libya, Egypt, and other countries has raised questions about ethical issues behind an Internet “Kill Switch,” the idea of a single point of access by which any nation’s leadership could shutdown their internet access. In the United States, debate over so-called “Kill Switch” legislation has focused on the free speech aspect. If it were technologically possible to shutdown internet access singlehandedly who is to say that power wouldn’t be exploited as it has been abroad? But on the other side of the coin is the question of cyber security. With so much commerce, communication, and security dependent on a loose and non-standardized network infrastructure, it could actually make sense to have an easy way to quarantine a bug or massive cyber attack. Today, hosts Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain are joined by Andrew McLaughlin — a former Berkman Fellow and White House Deputy Chief Technology Office — and Brett Solomon — Executive Director of Access, a global movement promoting digital freedom. Together with an audience Lessig and Zittrain take on the Kill Switch.
Musicians are increasingly becoming their own managers, promoters, bookers, and agents. And with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, BandCamp, and dozens of other ways of staying in touch with their audience, the concert never stops. There’s no way to put a dollar value on this engagement, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile. How are artists building an audience, completely outside of their music, simply by opening up online? Nancy Baym — author of the recent book Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Professor of Communications at University of Kansas, and all around music aficionado — joined me this week to talk about how fans are building genuine relationships online and how artists are able to thrive because of them.
Big music publishers may be worried about declining CD sales and the inability of digital purchases to make up the difference. But independent artists have continued to create, innovate, connect with fans, and even make a pretty decent living on their own, without big budget promotions — or even physical copies of their albums in stores. For today’s show we were lucky to be joined by two amazing artists: Amanda Palmer sat down with David Weinberger to talk about her latest self-release, Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, and her mission to redefine what success as a musician means. And Donald Glover chatted with us about the wonder of his quintuple threat career — star of NBC’s Community, writer, standup comic, remix artist, and rapper — his most recent release, and how he makes a living making music that is free as in beer, and free as in speech.
The idea that technology could want something seems kind of outlandish, almost like science fiction. But journalist Kevin Kelly is proposing a kind of technological self-determination in his new book What Technology Wants. It’s not exactly robots with souls that Kelly is suggesting. It’s more of an evolutionary theory of technological development, the idea that one technology naturally evolves from another. That the mobile phone, for instance, was an inevitable evolution from the telephone, or that the internet we know today was an inevitable next step from the spread of the networked PC. Well, not exactly inevitable. Best listen to David Weinberger’s interview with Kevin Kelly to hear him explain it himself.
Our emails have been dinging off the hook here at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, with notes from journalists and concerned citizens trying to make some sense of the story-in-progress that is Wikileaks. So today we pull together some of the brightest minds at the Berkman Center to talk about Wikileaks, with Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig moderating. Zittrain, Lessig, and the Berkman Center Fellows explore many facets surrounding the Wikileaks imbroglio, including the values of transparency and freedom of speech; the legality and ethics of the Wikileaks data dump; the role of the news media; and the involvement of government and private tech organizations to take Wikileaks down.
With the November elections behind us here in the US Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig take on the issue of money in politics, and investigate how campaign contributions sway candidates for office and influence policy.
In the face of a campaign finance system struggling to find a more ethical framework, Larry suggests a new basis for citizen funded elections, Democracy Vouchers. Jonathan inquires as to what a Democracy Voucher is and just how the heck such a system would work.
What are your thoughts? Any compliments or criticisms? What topic would you like to see Jonathan and Larry take on next month? Share your ideas with us in the comments, or drop us a tweet.
CC-licensed Music this Week from Morgantj and Scott Altham.
Photo courtesy of Amar Ashar.
Produced this week by Daniel Dennis Jones and Molly Sauter, with hosts Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, and help from David Weinberger, Amar Ashar, Jake Shapiro, Lisa Carlivati, and Szelena Gray.
Wikipedia is now likely the top return on almost any web search you do. But how did it get to be that way? The collaboratively edited online compendium of human knowledge is at once reviled by highbrow scholars who make strict rules about its use as a cited resource, and at other times lauded as the greatest example of the power of human cooperation and the web. Joseph Reagle has just completed an exhaustive study of the resource entitled Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. The book sheds light on how tens of thousands of volunteers overcame great obstacles—lack of scholarly experience, and nearly insurmountable differences in viewpoint—to build a culture that, in spite of all reason, works. Joseph, a Berkman Fellow, sat down with David Weinberger to share some key insights from his research.
A lot of e-ink has been spilled about how the Internet has fundamentally altered content industries. TV, film, news, books; all are still experiencing growing pains. But, no other industry has experienced more trauma and volatility than music. One of the first victims of the electronic piracy epidemic, music companies, along with artists and policymakers, have been scrambling to find new solid strategies for success. Meanwhile, innovation has flourished in the form of new means of delivering content, new ways of connecting artists with fans, and evolving models for digital music sales and touring, all of which present countless opportunities and risks. Next spring, the Berklee College of Music and MIDEM, in association with the Berkman Center, are hosting the Rethink Music Conference, bringing together artists, industry representatives, policymakers, educators, and innovators to discuss this very issue: the future of creative works, their distribution, and the laws that regulate them. Berkman and Berklee have also announced a Call for Papers seeking innovative proposals to amend US policy regarding creation and distribution of musical works. And, Berklee and the Harvard Business School are offering a $50,000 award for the best new music business model. We sat down with two people who have been very involved in preparing for the event—Allen Bargfrede, a digital music lawyer and Assistant Professor in the Music Business Department at Berklee, and Chris Bavitz, Assistant Director of the Berkman Center’s Cyberlaw Clinic and Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School—to discuss what the Rethink Music Conference is all about.
The future of video lies within our grasp, people. Powerful new technologies and web services are available that not only make video available anytime, anywhere, but also make sharing and creating easier than ever, all over the world. Think of the smartphone revolution; the explosion in high bandwidth connectivity; and the millions of channels available to make your video available to your friends, or the world. But this future is still elusive at best. Think of remixers sued for using copyrighted content; the fact that most networks in the world are still choked or filtered; and a simple, but threatening lack of media literacy. Today we report back from a conference meant to redefine the future of video for the good. The 2nd Annual Open Video Conference brought together filmmakers, students, thinkers, inventors, hackers, businessfolks, and lawyers for panels, screenings, performances, and exhibits, all focused on the future of video. We talked with Tiffiniy Cheng and Holmes Wilson, co-founders of the Participatory Culture Foundation, about some technologies in the works to make video more accessible. We spoke with keynote presenter Adam Chodikoff, senior producer of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, about the value of the mainstream media. And we put together our own ad hoc panel to help us define what Open Video means and how we can get it.
Whitney Harper is the central figure in one of the most recent anti-piracy court battles being waged by the Recording Industry Association of America. She’s only one of any number of accused illegal downloaders. But what makes her case different? Whitney could be considered an “Innocent Infringer”—because she did not understand she was illegal filesharing. But whether this distinction matters depends on the outcome of her trial, which may soon be headed to the US Supreme Court. Charles Nesson spoke with both Whitney and her legal counsel, Kiwi Camara.
Net Neutrality. What started out as a high level policy debate among internet service providers and telecommunications geeks has since blossomed into an all out war, with battle lines ostensibly drawn between those who value free expression and innovation on one side, and free market advocates on another. The idea is that ISPs should not be allowed discriminate between any kind of content that comes over the wires to your home. The implication is that some regulator needs to step in to make sure this idea is enforced. But as with any contentious debate there are subtleties, complications, and hints that the discussion should be steered in a completely different direction. And few have a better acuity for the nuances of such a geeky topic than Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig.
What should be the mission of universities in cyberspace? What can universities contribute to the future of the internet? How can our educational institutions promote ideals of free exchange of information yet cope with the complex intellectual property challenges presented by the net? A group of academic experts, University professors, administrators, and innovators met up to discuss solutions to this very issue at a conference entitled University and Cyberspace: Reshaping Knowledge Institutions for the Networked Age earlier this summer. Charles Nesson was one of those participants. He joined David Weinberger in the studio to talk about how the University can tackle these challenges head on.
So it looks like you guys liked “Zittrain and Lessig Take On… Competition!” Last week’s season premiere of Radio Berkman drew the largest number of listeners and tweets in our show’s history! Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig co-host a definitive tour of how the competitive landscape for the digital technology market has evolved in the 12 years since the famous Microsoft antitrust battle. Give it a listen if you haven’t already. Are you ready for a second helping? Ever wondered how Microsoft got in trouble in the first place? Google’s got all those little apps and widgets that run our lives — is that legal? And could Apple’s Steve Jobs be the next to get hauled in front of a federal judge? This week segment producers (and non-lawyers) Daniel Dennis Jones and Molly Sauter take on “Competition” in plain English, with viewpoints from Ken Auletta, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Gary Reback, Phil Malone, and Brian Chen.
The year was 1998. Cher’s autotune anthem Believe was one of the year’s biggest hits, Titanic had swept the Oscars, and in some sterile software campus in the Northwest, Bill Gates was rehearsing a deposition. It’s been over 12 years since Gates’ and Microsoft’s anti-trust battle with the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission first hit the courts. It is still seen as a watershed for the management of technology companies in the dot com age. But in the dozen years that have passed, people are still speculating whether the anti-trust case against Microsoft made any difference, and whether the software and technology companies of today are engaging in anti-competitive practices similar to or more risky than the ones that got Microsoft in trouble. Who are the Microsofts of today? Facebook? Apple? Google? And how do we manage competition in the digital age? Today, two of the leading minds on the internet and law, Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig, take on competition.
Noise is distracting and irritating enough in the real world. Our focus is easily disrupted by unwanted clutter and sounds from our surrounding environment. So we often find ourselves turning to digital spaces to try control the chaos, and concentrate on tasks. But noise still exists in the virtual world, and is often more insidious. Digital distractions disguise themselves as useful information — posts from friends on Twitter and Facebook, text messages, email, and instant messaging. Separating the noise from the signal is often an arduous and personalized task. And as a new generation of youngsters grows up with mobile phones and uninterrupted network connectivity, researchers fret about a possible information overload and its effects on attention span. Today’s guest, Kate Crawford, is an Associate Professor in Media Research at the University of New South Wales. She has spent some time researching how noise inserts itself into our lives, particularly through mobile technologies. She spoke with David Weinberger about the history of noise and how noise lives on in the digital world.
Music this week from Clone: “Private Reserve” (composed by Kate Crawford and Bo Daley)
In the early days of the LLC launching a business might have been a simple task. After all, chances are your partners were close by and you probably worked within the laws of your state. It was mostly a local task. Setting your shingle out in the 21st Century might be a bit more arduous. You’ve got partners in different time zones, and where once you might have met face to face, now you’re making decisions over conference call, IM, maybe even Twitter and Facebook. And all of the paperwork and record keeping involved with staying legal seems somehow past its expiration date. Today’s guest says the LLC was probably one of the greatest inventions of all time, on par with the steam engine and electricity. This legal infrastructure for operating a business helped promote innovation by pinning the cost of risk to a collective entity rather than to the individual. But the humble LLC has a lot of growing to do if it wants to keep up with the digital revolution. Oliver Goodenough — of the Law Lab at the Berkman Center — talks with guest interviewer Zeba Khan about the evolution of business law, and a new initiative he’s been working on with the State of Vermont to let new businesses function online.
CC/Public Domain Music from: Learning Music Monthly Morgantj – Café Connection
What are you doing with your spare cycles? You know, the bits of time you spend on the web when you’re not really being productive? Maybe you’re waiting for a file to download. Maybe you’re playing a game. Maybe you’re even filling out a form. All of these little moments could in fact be put to good use. In some cases, they are. And you might not even know it. For instance, when you type out a Captcha — those little squiggly words on a web form you transcribe to prove you’re human — you are in fact transcribing a word from a scanned book. A word that is illegible to a computer’s eye. Here, you’re simultaneously proving you are a human being (not a robot), and also doing a good deed (helping to transcribe text). You can thank today’s guest for that little innovation. Luis von Ahn — professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and expert in the field of human computation — explores the little innovations on the web that are harnessing the power of millions to change the world. Not always for the good.
CC/Public Domain Music from: Learning Music Monthly State Shirt – Computer Neurowaxx – Carioca
Take a look at the headlines of any major newspaper or news magazine. Check out the non-fiction bestsellers at Amazon. The net is on everyone’s minds. Or more specifically, the way the net is on our minds is on our minds. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows paints a bleak picture of what the net is doing to our plastic brains, cheapening our relationships, and ruining our attention spans. Clay Shirky’s recent release Cognitive Surplus on the other hand celebrates the web’s power to enable quick, smart, crowdsourced action and creativity. Hundreds of other authors and thinkers have responded with their own variations and theories on what the internet is doing to us, and what we are doing on the net. With all of this thinking on the net, we thought it was time to do some thinking on the thinking on the net. And luckily we have two great thinker thinkers in house. Our very own David Weinberger has suggested jokingly that there should be a Myers-Briggs test for net fanaticism, while memetracker and ROFLCon founder Tim Hwang has grouped net thinkers into schools. Today, they explain how different thinkers think on the net, and importantly, why the heck everyone’s so interested. What kind of net thinker are you? Give us your thoughts in the comments.
MMORPGs may maim and pwn but words will never hurt me. In online gaming environments you may be getting shot at, impaled, or run over by tanks. But the more serious damage may come in the form of the offensive chatter bandied about casually between players connected remotely via headsets. Racist, homophobic, and sexist language proliferates as gamers trash talk. But often such language and name calling is used, not to offend, but to distract and gain attention. Such “Griefing” behavior is meant to be ironic. “I am not racist/sexist/homophobic,” a griefer will think, “therefore, my use of an offensive term is just a joke. If you interpret it any other way then you just don’t get it.” But that doesn’t mean griefing doesn’t have an impact. Lisa Nakamura — Professor in the Institute of Communication Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and author of the book Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet — spoke to David Weinberger about the origins of griefing, and how online communities are dealing with it.
CC Music this week: Scott Altham: Hear Us Now Learning Music: Ovulation
With the estimated 250 to 450 million soccer fans now descending upon South Africa for the World Cup, we can expect to see billions of dollars of spent in local communities, benefitting the entire region. Locals and soccer fans alike are also looking out for an increase in crime that comes with such a dramatic increase in population. Vandalism and mugging come with the territory. But NGOs and public agencies are also looking out for an increase in crimes that prey on South Africa’s vulnerable young population. In a country already facing high instances of child abuse, rape, and sexual violence towards women — children can easily stumble upon pornography and pathways to abuse by way of broadcast, internet, and mobile phones. Nadine Naidoo of Visionaries in Africa was concerned about the potential for the World Cup to bring with it a dramatic increase in sexual violence towards children, enabled by the media. So she is running a 30 day multimedia project of her own, coinciding with the World Cup and incorporating video, podcasts, interviews, and a live concert to raise awareness about the dangers facing children.
CC Music this week: Arslkhan: “Love Odyssey” Greg Williams: “Teagarden, Blues, and Rain”
Let’s admit it: the advertising world we once knew is long dead. In a couple short decades, the digital revolution has fundamentally undermined all of the old arbiters of image, from Madison Avenue to Hollywood to K Street. Companies have been quick to jump ship and join the social media bandwagon. Even without clear proof that Facebook and smartphone apps will garner them an audience. It’s almost enough to make Don Draper roll over in his scotch glass. But it’s not just Facebook and smartphones that companies have to worry about. Be it the blockbuster movie producer trying to find ticket buyers, the multinational pizza company seeking hungry consumers, or the home-based graphic novelist looking for readers — the ways of reaching an audience are now limitless. And there is a premium for “sticky” experiences that engage consumers, over the old-fashioned billboards and banner ads which consumers are more likely to overlook. And building these experiences can be risky, and costly. Still, companies are taking the gamble, buying up companies with no clear revenue model, and investing in experimental outreach strategies for which “success” has only a few solid metrics. To navigate the muddy waters of digital outreach you need a guide. Sarah Szalavitz is one of the more informed and experienced folks in the social media world. Founder and CEO of 7-Robot — as well as a former Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law Graduate, and media mogul with too many credits to mention (we put some links in the Reference Section below) — Sarah swung by the Berkman Center not long ago for a conversation about what she calls “social design” and the cooperative evolution of brands, people, and social media spaces.
CC Music this week: Podington Bear: Jackie and Floyd General Fuzz: Acclimate Jaspertine: Pling Coconut Monkeyrocket: Accidental Beatnik
If a picture is worth a thousand words, and video moves at 30 frames per second, how many words could you get for 24 hours of footage? Today’s guest started a project that may have the answer to that question. The Global Lives Project picked ten subjects from around the world, followed each of them with a camera for 24 hours straight, and is now sharing the footage of their lives with the world, uncut, unaltered, in museum exhibits and online. It’s fascinating enough as an art project. But for David Evan Harris – a trained sociologist and a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future – the project also raises interesting questions about the role multimedia can play in the more traditional world of academic research. If you’re near San Francisco you can experience the Global Lives Project for yourself at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts until June 20, 2010. Listen in here for a sneak preview.
CC Music this week: Neurowaxx – Carioca & Pop Circus
Step into a world where information floats through the open air — around your house, around your town, around the world — just waiting for you to reach up and grab it. Music, movies, phone calls from loved ones, the sound of your baby crying — it all travels in the charged particle space known as Spectrum. Your average consumer might interact with a dozen or more devices on a daily basis, designed specifically to both emit and pluck information to and from the air. But how much do we really understand spectrum? There are fights going on right now between regulators, media and telecommunications companies, and consumers about how spectrum is bought, sold, and used. Today’s guest argues that we need to go back to basics to effectively settle these battles. Christian Sandvig is a Berkman Center Fellow and director of the Project on Public Policy and Advanced Communication Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. On this week’s show David Weinberger and Sandvig elegantly deconstruct Spectrum, and give us some ideas as to how we can use this space more effectively.
CC Music this week: Jeremiah Jacobs: Bounce Loops
Last week the FCC announced that they would seek a “third way” in regulating the broadband industry, one that they hope will respect a recent court decision prohibiting them from cracking down on telecomms, while also ensuring some level of net neutrality. Susan Crawford co-led the FCC Agency Review team for the Obama-Biden transition team and served as President Barack Obama’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy until December 2009. She now teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. She founded OneWebDay and can be found blogging here. Susan spoke with David Weinberger about what the FCC’s “third way” is, and what it could mean for how bits get to your house. Creative Commons music used this week: Scott Altham
Does the discussion of a free and open internet really have to be an ideological debate? Some would say the situation is black or white, open or closed. You are either for freedom of content, the right to post anonymously, and to opt out of having your data tracked, or you are in favor of censorship, filtering, and monitoring. But delve deeper into the discussion and you’ll notice the nuance. In fact, if you don’t notice some caveats in the debate you’re probably not looking deeply enough. One person who has spent a lot of time looking at those caveats is legal expert and Berkman Center fellow Donnie Dong. He says there is room for more than one perspective on how the net should work, and cautions against pursuing a common denominator along ideological lines. Culturally, linguistically, and individually we do not see a unified internet, regardless of the technological underpinnings that bring us together on the web. Donnie says the multi-cultural web we are currently experiencing represents a kind of “cyberpluralism,” a phenomenon that would be good to acknowledge as we debate the future of the web.
Music this week: Scott Altham – Hear Us Now Childish Gambino – Baby Doll
How could pirates and the content industries learn to get along? In many contexts they are beginning to get along quite well. Some in the film, software, and music industries are finding ways to use pirate markets to their advantage — rather than simply using law enforcement to shut them down. Recent research is showing that pirated versions of films, software, and albums actually are reaching a market that wouldn’t otherwise be purchasing these goods legitimately — whether due to cost or general inaccessibility. Joe Karaganis of the Social Science Research Council gives us the scoop on piracy in developing countries.
CC Music this week: Ducket – Another Girl J Lang – Crazy Love
In 2008, Michael Slaby served as Chief Technology Officer from Obama for America, and helped with technology policy as the Obama campaign transitioned to an administration. One of the most difficult aspects of the transition has come in trying to keep a huge group of grassroots, web-enabled supporters, after the campaigning is over and the policy making has begun. Today David Weinberger speaks with Michael about how government uses the web to stay engaged, and some of the policies regarding freedom and the internet that the administration has pursued since taking office.
CC Music this week: Jasptertine: Pling Jeremiah Jacobs
In an age when every conversation, email, and tweet could be digitally archived, how honest we are – or how deceptive – is open for scrutiny. But there is still a lot we don’t know about the nature of deception. How can we tell if someone is telling the truth? Are there verbal cues, in addition to the sweaty palms and rapid heartbeat? Is there a difference between lies, or is every lie the same? And how does the medium of conversation – an email, a text message, a phone call – affect the type of lie we might tell? This week on the podcast, Judith Donath interviews Jeff Hancock, of the Social Media Lab at Cornell University, on how we lie, and the role technology plays in the evolution of the lie.
CC Music this week: Neurowaxx: Pop Circus Robert Rich: Cowell Piano
Some people guard their privacy online jealously. As much as they want free email and facebook, they shudder at thoughts of having their data scraped, email addresses exposed, and photos indexed. But the trend of web services is not in favor of these digital hermits. More and more social networks and applications are popping up, allowing users to trade their personal information for cheap and amazing services. One such service – Blippy.com – is like a Twitter for your debit card. Sign up with Blippy, and you can immediately and automatically share info about what you buy, watch, and listen to with your own social network or the whole world. David Hornik loves Blippy. He loves the trend towards radical transparency. And as an investor with August Capital – who’ve helped give life to successful startups like evite and stumbleupon – he’s got his eye on where this trend could be going. And by the way, you can follow what David purchases at his public blippy account.
Previous Episodes in this thread: Adventures in Anonymity Part II: The Future of Transparency and How to Stop It – Joel Reidenberg of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham on re-engineering the web to fight transparency’s most dangerous effects Adventures in Anonymity Part I – Sam Bayard, Assistant Director of the Citizen Media Law Project on whether legal action could put online anonymity out of commission
High speed internet may be scarce in the US, but the dream of having web be fast/cheap/everywhere is snowballing. The FCC’s much anticipated National Broadband Plan was finally released Tuesday. And Google’s Fiber Initiative – a move to finance and deploy an unbelievable gigabit speed connection to some yet-to-be-named lucky town or towns in the United States – has energized dozens of small communities across the nation. Today we talk to the IT Manager of one of these towns – Michael Cross of Kalamazoo, Michigan – to see just what they see in the opportunity of ultra high speed connectivity.
CC Music this week: Jeremiah Jacobs – Pushing Past
Millions of people are now interacting in virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft using the guise of avatars. In these spaces, users can actually design their avatars to be subtly or radically different from who they are in real life. And it turns out how people interact through their avatars – the signals they give one another through conversation and appearance – can tell us a lot about the choices and biases that inform our behavior in the real world. Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab has been doing a number of experiments with people, avatars, and virtual worlds. As avatars become more common and more useful outside of gaming – people are already using avatars for virtual workplaces, customer service, and advertising – questions of ethics, trust, and honesty become significantly more important. After all, it’s one thing if your avatar is casually conversing with, battling, or dating another avatar who might not be what he or she seems in real life. It’s quite another when corporations or political candidates realize that they can handcraft an avatar to take advantage of your biases and earn your trust for their own purposes. Jeremy sat down with Judith Donath – who leads the Berkman Center’s Law Lab Spring 2010 Speaker Series: The Psychology and Economics of Trust and Honesty – to talk more about this fascinating topic.
CC Music: Jaspertine: “Pling”
Transparency challenges the very existence of the Rule of Law. That is the very provocative thesis of today’s guest, who suggests that there is a tragedy behind the web’s powerful lubricative effect on the flow of information. Data about your address, purchases, academic performance, travel itineraries, likes and dislikes are all quite simple to track down these days at little or no cost. We often give up this information voluntarily, in the interests of cultural participation, or obliviously when we simply skip a privacy notice. And where it once took teams of archivists and researchers to dig up and collate dirt on people and institutions, today’s powerful automated online databases wield personal data over their subjects almost tyrannically, voiding the engineered obscurity of the past, and rendering anonymity obsolete. Joel Reidenberg is the academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University. We sat down with him to ask how we could re-engineer the web to fight transparency’s most dangerous effects.
CC Music this week: Stefsax: “I Like it Like That (s.thaens)” State Shirt: “Computer”
This week we sit down with Carl Malamud, who with the group Public.Resource.org is pushing to put law in the public domain. We covered the issue of copyright on law a few months ago in Radio Berkman 129, where Steve Schultze introduced us to RECAP – a software that helps legal researchers bypass hefty fees for access to legal documents. There is now a movement afoot, not just to bypass the system that puts law behind a paywall, but to remove it altogether. If you think this is a small issue – note that Americans spend some $10 billion a year just to access legal documents, everything from local building codes to Supreme Court records. The Executive Branch alone pays $50 million to access district court records. Some cash-strapped law schools ration students’ access to per-page charging services for legal records. And journalists, non-profits, and average citizens interested in legal research are feeling just as nickeled-and-dimed by fees. David Weinberger and Carl Malamud sat down to talk about the chances for freeing the written word of the law.
CC Music this week: General Fuzz – “Cream” Ghost – “Ice and Chilli”
When the Federal Communications Commission announced in April of 2009 that they would be pursuing a National Broadband Plan – picture something as ambitious as the interstate highway initiative but for bytes instead of cars – web surfers with a need for speed began warming up their mouse muscles. It seems like we’ve sat on the side of the road while our friends in Europe and Asia have zoomed past us in the race to faster net speeds at cheaper prices. But how does the US really stack up to the rest of the world? As part of their Broadband Plan the FCC commissioned Yochai Benkler and a team of researchers at the Berkman Center to put together an international review of broadband deployment and policy. The result is an exhaustive 333-page report showing the US roughly in the middle of 30 industrial nations – in terms of speed, penetration, and cost. How did we end up in the middle? And more importantly, how did so many other countries get ahead? Yochai sat down with David Weinberger to talk about how they found these results, and what the US could do to ambitiously pursue a faster web.
CC Music this week: Jeremiah Jacobs – Pushing Past BOCrew – SoulCornerBeat Photo courtesy of flickr user paulnich
Rural communities don’t usually have the same support networks for queer youth that you might find in big cities or college towns. Mary L. Gray spent two years working in small rural communities in Kentucky, and found that as queer youth are forming their identities here, the experiences they have in the real world often blur with experiences with communities and peer groups online. Mary calls the blending of town squares, churches, schools, and community centers in real life, and their virtual counterparts Boundary Publics. And the way these boundary publics function as support networks and outlets for expression can make a real difference in the lives of young people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and questioning. Mary L. Gray is from the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and is the author of Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America.
We’ll be back soon with more full episodes of Radio Berkman. In the meantime, we’d like to share a clip from a short interview we did not long ago with Lawrence Liang of the Alternative Law Forum on piracy, media, and culture.
When under threat from an approaching feline, gazelles will repeatedly leap up and down in the air – even when logically it seems they should run. It’s an example of a signal – used to communicate a concept to trigger a reaction. In this case, “I am strong and fast – if you chase me you’ll be wasting your time.” What does this phenomenon of nature have to do with human communication online? We give off signals all the time – to deceive, to attract, to manipulate, to provoke reactions and establish impressions of who we are. We have gotten used to practices of signaling in person. But the web has completely changed how we signal. Judith Donath, founder of MIT’s Sociable Media research group, is completing a book on signaling theory and online communications called Signals, Truth, and Design. Today she stops by Radio Berkman to chat about signaling and human behavior on the web.
Creative Commons music used this week from Jeremiah Jacobs.
The closing of another year brings with it an excuse for celebration. And what could be more fun than looking back at the year that was and trying to distill some of the top trends in the web, technology, and society? David Weinberger attended Supernova 2009 in San Francisco, where some of the biggest names in tech, business, government, and academia came together to talk past, present, and future of networks. He chatted with a number of those thought-leaders, and came away with three major threads for 2009 which might help guide our thinking as we go into 2010: The Broadband Initiative The Growth of Real Time Web The Web and the Obama Administration So curl up by the fire with your generative digital listening device, pop in those earbuds, and listen in as we reflect on three of the major trends of 2009 with David Weinberger.
Creative Commons music used this week: Brad Sucks – Gasoline Morgantj – Raindrops
Is it hard to imagine a world in which people are treated fairly? Paid a fair wage for the work they contribute? Rewarded monetarily for the successful intellectual products that they help to produce? Did you just scoff? If so you might be a knowledge worker who toils day in and day out on information goods – products like software, vaccines, or media – just to see the company you work for take the copyright or patent and reap all the rewards from your innovation. A new working paper from researchers at MIT, Boston University, and the University of Michigan shows that people, companies, and the economy as a whole can all benefit and grow when we forget what we think we know about property rights and compensate people fairly for the work they do. Take off your rose-colored glasses, put on your headphones, and listen to this interview with one of those researchers, Marshall Van Alstyne, as he explains how innovation and fair compensation can go hand in hand.
CC-licensed music this week: Scott Altham: Hear Us Now (poptastic mix) Neurowaxx: Haram Beat Photo by Kevin Eddy
What if a robot could be your closest friend? Know everything about you? Be able to peruse old family photos with you, read your journal entries, know what you are allergic to, and all your deepest darkest secrets? Put all those romantic notions of science fiction out of your mind. “Digital Companions” are seen by some as a natural extension of computers and the web – and possible within 30 years. Yorick Wilks is a leading researcher on the Companions Project. We sat down with him to find out more about Digital Companions in our every day life.
This week’s artist: Robert Rich: Cowell Piano
Is the fate of books a forgone conclusion? Will they just continue to make their way out of print and into digital form? This week’s guest, author Cory Doctorow, suggests that we might want to keep books in print for a little while longer. Not just out of nostalgia – but actually to protect the institution of copyright. Cory Doctorow — a longtime supporter of remixing and free culture, who releases his books under Creative Commons licenses — now throws his weight behind copyright. Huh? Find out what happens when books meet bits on this week’s Radio Berkman.
This week’s artists Coconut Monkeyrocket – Accidental Beatnik MorganTJ -Time Decay
The “Walled Garden” is an oft-used metaphor to describe an area of the web that is somehow closed off – think AOL in the 90s, or any site that lives behind a paywall. To some, these areas of the net are exclusive avenues to brilliantly curated content. To others “Walled Gardens” are threats to the open nature of the net. Elizabeth Goodman, a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a design researcher with Intel, has taken the metaphor of the Garden back to its roots (so-to-speak), to see if we can’t reimagine web communities through the lens of these physical spaces.
CC-licensed music this week: Duckett – Another Girl (instrumental) _ghost – Ice and Chilli
There are few subjects more potentially divisive as the Free Culture Movement. Free Culture activists believe in a future in which people will be free to remix and distribute creative works like literature, movies, music, software, and images. These are the folks who can toss around phrases like ‘Free as in Speech versus Free as in Beer’ to illustrate distinctions in legal code. A world where anyone can feel free to edit a photo, remix a song or video, or modify a piece of software without the constraint of excessive laws or artificial limits – sounds great, right? But it raises more questions than you might think. Gabriella Coleman is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University who has given a lot of thought to the role of genre and piracy in how we might build a Free Culture that works. She sat down with our guest host Elizabeth Stark for a word or two on some of the toughest questions facing Free Culture.
CC-licensed music this week: Scott Altham – Hear Us Now (poptastic mix) _ghost – Ice and Chilli
Few dispute that the web will be the dominant medium of the 21st Century – swallowing whole newspapers, books, radio, television, and the cinema. And even as the web grows virtually – over a trillion unique urls and growing – it shrinks physically – from laptop, to netbook, from cell phone, to even tinier and ubiquitous communication devices. The growth of the web seems radically different from that of television, radio, and newspapers. It seems like it was so grassroots, so rapid. But Professor W. Russell Neuman of the University of Michigan argues that to predict the growth of the web in the future we need to take a good hard look at just how those 20th Century technologies and infrastructures came to be so dominant. So, what does history have to say about how this tiny little medium will grow?
CC-licensed music this week: Neurowaxx: Pop Circus General Fuzz: Warm Steel
Author and Professor of Public Policy Viktor Mayer-Schönberger believes that digital memory is a little too perfect. Every word you post on the web, every picture, every video, tweet, and email is set in stone, archived, permanently findable. Like the proverbial elephant, the digital world doesn’t forget. There are incredible benefits to this. And there might be consequences as well, ranging from invasion of privacy, to the impairment of human memory. David Weinberger spoke with Viktor about some of these consequences, and how we might help our machines learn to forget.
CC-licensed music this week: Neurowaxx: Carioca Jaspertine: Pling
Ownership structures for creative works – such as Copyright, Creative Commons, Fair Use, Public Domain – abound. This week, Kenneth Crews, the director of the Copyright Office at Columbia University, speaks with us about some of the distinctions, and the ways to make sure your work is protected as much or as little as possible.
CC-licensed music this week: Jaspertine: Pling Greg Williams: Teagarden Blues and Rain
Internet access. Anymore, it’s something many of us take for granted. Like water from the tap, power from the plug, outrageous outbursts from Kanye West. It’s there, it happens – why question it? Sure, there’s a lot of buzz about broadband and net neutrality going on in Washington, and in Geek Caves around the country. But the Net users on Main Street haven’t yet hit a tipping point. The fact is, your average consumer’s web connection isn’t very fast or cheap. But it is just fast and cheap enough that they won’t question, complain, or demand better. What is the ideal web? And how do we get past the consumer complacency to build it? Well, Clay Shirky has some ideas. And we were lucky enough to get an exclusive with him on One Web Day earlier this week. Listen in as he lays out a few visions for the potential of the web.
CC-licensed music this week: Coconut Monkeyrocket: “Accidental Beatnik” Podington Bear – Jackie and Floyd
Have you ever said something you wish you didn’t? Put your foot in your mouth? Insulted someone, cursed, or threatened somebody? In the real world, you can whisper your most seditious thoughts, and hope they don’t come back to bite you. Well, online, your comments are archived indefinitely. And if you don’t want those comments traced to you, you can just choose a funny forum name, or remain anonymous. But you are NOT anonymous. Believe it or not most of your anonymous blogs, comments, forum posts, and even emails have tiny digital fingerprints that can lead right back to you. Not a big deal if you’re commenting about how awesome “Blame it on the Rain” was on a Milli Vanilli fan board. But a growing number of online anonymous wordsmiths are being unmasked as they become the subject of civil suits. Sam Bayard, a Berkman Fellow and Assistant Director of the Citizen Media Law Project has his eye on such cases. And today, we’ll try to figure out whether legal action could put online anonymity out of commission forever.
CC-licensed music this week: Brad Sucks: Dropping out of School J Lang: Crazy Love
Steve Schultze is a busy fellow. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He recently joined the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy as Associate Director. He also is one of the developers behind RECAP – an ambitious and provocative project that seeks to bring publicly available digital court records out from behind a costly paywall. What is RECAP? Find out on this week’s episode! And why are there fees for court records? Steve also just dropped a great working paper that goes into more detail on the topic. If you’re in Washington, DC next week catch Steve’s talk on RECAP at the O’Reilly Gov 2.0 conference on Tuesday, September 8. Naturally we think Steve will make a terrific addition to the Princeton team — congrats, Steve! — and, while we’re sad to lose him, we’re looking forward to stronger ties to CITP and opportunities to collaborate and partner in the future.
CC-licensed music this week: Neurowaxx – Pop Circus General Fuzz – Acclimate
From August 13, 2009:
The hype shows no signs of abating. Now that people have moved from just talking-about-Twitter, to the more meta talking-about-talking-about-Twitter, we here at Radio Berkman decided to take on the topic from our own perspective and see if there is possibly anything new left to be said about the popular microblogging service. Turns out there is.
CC-licensed music this week: Coconut Monkeyrocket: “Accidental Beatnik” Morgantj: Café Connection Neurowaxx: “Pop Circus” Podington Bear: “The Squeaky Song” RAC Remix: Zero (orig. Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
Find the full Twitter debate here: http://blogs.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2009/08/13/radio-berkman-supreme-is-twitter-a-revolution-a-debate/
The Berkman Center for Internet Society was blessed with the presence of dozens of interns this summer – some of the best, the brightest, and most energetic folks in the field of cyber study. Four of them came together earlier this summer for a semi-Oxford style debate on a topic of importance. The question: Is Twitter a Revolutionary Force for Social Communication? We excerpted from this debate for this week’s Radio Berkman (listen here), but the full debate is chock full of some great perspectives on whether Twitter is a force for good, evil, or just not such a big deal. Give it a listen!
Is the idea of a mainstream video culture dead? TV news anchors, sitcom stars, and A-list actors are losing ground to the groundswell of citizen journalists, independent web series creators, and the occasional cats falling off of pianos on YouTube. If everyone is a producer, what role will video play in our lives in the future? This was one line of questioning taking place at the first ever Open Video Conference in New York City this past June. In addition to the producer question were questions about the sharing of creative works, and questions about how we can make it technologically cheaper and easier to share, collaborate on, and deliver video in the future. Today’s Radio Berkman is a report back from OVC, with Amar Ashar, Chris Peterson, and Catherine White of the Berkman Center. Special thanks today to Catherine White who gathered audio from the OVC!
CC-licensed music this week: Podington Bear – Jackie and Floyd Morgantj – Café Connection
You don’t need to be a crowned Ranger class master hacker to sneak into someone’s email or facebook account these days. Which means that you’re not simply being a nervous nellie if you’re worried about security. In fact, users of public WiFi should be worried. If you use WiFi to access some of the most popular email and social networking services, like, gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, and facebook, your account information floats around in the air, often completely unsecured. You want some more fear with your coffee? Chris Soghoian, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, took a look into WiFi and account security to find out just how scary the situation is.
CC-licensed music this week: General Fuzz – Cream Arslkhan – Love Odyssey
At $80,000 per song, the 24 tracks Jammie Thomas-Rasset is accused of sharing on Kazaa could represent the most expensive album of all time. Last week a federal jury suggested the fine, adding up to $1.92 million, seemed like a fair price for willful infringement. Thomas-Rasset’s pro bono legal team of Kiwi Camara and Joe Sibley promise to appeal the verdict in this, the first file sharing case to see trial. A conversation shortly before the trial showed a number of issues that indeed did not make it to court this time around – including the constitutionality of the RIAA’s investigative tactics. Check out David Weinberger’s conversation with Thomas-Rasset’s lead attorney Kiwi Camara to find out where the defense stands.
CC-licensed music this week: State Shirt – Computer Cordafonia – Dreamland
Commons are becoming so common in the digital age (pardon the pun) that they are redefining the term. Music, video, literature, scholarly works, software – all of these can be placed under Creative Commons licenses to allow culture and knowledge to proliferate more freely. Wikipedia operates by similar principles. But where did these principles come from? How do they operate? Where are they going? Journalist and author David Bollier recently released a history of the digital commons movement, called Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. He sat down with David Weinberger to shed some light on this fascinating topic.
CC-licensed music this week: Chad Crouch – “Horizon Event” and “Be Inspired”
In this day of camera phones, automatic uploading to YouTube, blogs, and twitter telepathy we are all content creators. But if you’re not careful you might get sued for copyright infringement. Making a fan tribute, borrowing something for educational use, or even taping your vacation could open you up to thousands of potential claims for copyright infringement. How do you know when you’re in the clear? The Center for Social Media at American University developed the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video to help creators figure this out. Last week they released a video explaining the concepts of Fair Use even more clearly. We spoke with Patricia Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media to help us understand where this effort came from, and where it might be going.
When NBC took its programming off of iTunes in 2007, part of their motivation may have been to reduce the proliferation of their content in digital form. Well, recent research shows that the takedown may have directly resulted in a spike in piracy of their content. Research from the i-Lab at Carnegie Mellon University shows that after the NBC takedown, requests for NBC content on pirate networks grew by 11.5%. What happened to piracy when they put the content back up on iTunes a year later? And what lessons should the industry take from this experience? David Weinberger speaks to researchers Michael Smith and Rahul Telang about the results of their study. And how does big media learn from piracy and the culture of transparency on the web? Journalist and new media expert Daisy Whitney speaks to Daniel Dennis Jones about how big media and new media are learning to get along.
The Reference Section: • Follow the work of the iLab • Follow Daisy Whitney’s work, and her shows TWiM and New Media Minute • Read up on iLab’s recently released report on piracy and NBC Converting Pirates Without Cannibalizing Purchasers: The Impact of Digital Distribution on Physical Sales and Internet Piracy CC-licensed music this week: Morgantj – Café Connection General Fuzz – Cream J Lang – Crazy Love
If you like the idea of the above equation, well, you are either looking forward to a Robot vs. Lawyer stand-off, or, like today’s guest, you simply believe that law can be made better and more efficient through the use of software and applications to streamline repetitive legal tasks. Richard Susskind is the IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and author of the recently published (and provocatively titled) The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services. He recently sat down with the Berkman Center’s Brock Rutter to chat about how technology might be able to simultaneously make the work of lawyers more efficient, reduce overhead costs, and improve access to justice.
The Reference Section: • Follow Richard’s work • Watch Richard’s recent talk at the Berkman Center’s Law Lab • The recent NYTimes article on the firm that did away with its lawyers CC-licensed music this week: Arslkhan: “Love Odyssey” Coconut Monkeyrocket: “Accidental Beatnik”
The new “Computational Knowledge Engine” called Wolfram|Alpha has gone through a full media cycle before it has even been unleashed on the world. It has been hyped as a “Google Killer” and denounced as snake oil, and we’re still at least a few days from release. The simple goal behind the engine is to connect searchers with precise information. Wolfram|Alpha’s search magic comes through a combination of natural language processing and a giant pool of curated data. If that doesn’t make sense, all you need to know is that people can’t wait to get their information hungry hands on it. A 10-minute preview posted by the Berkman Center on YouTube late last Wednesday has already garnered over 100,000 views. Stephen Wolfram, the brains behind Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science, launches his brand new knowledge engine this month. He spoke to David Weinberger this week about how the tool works, and what it might do to search.
The Reference Section: • Listen to the uncut audio of this interview on Radio Berkman Supreme • Bookmark the soon-to-be-launched Wolfram|Alpha page • David Weinberger speculates on the significance of Wolfram|Alpha • Follow Stephen Wolfram on his blog CC-licensed music this week: Neurowaxx: “Pop Circus” Greg Williams: “Teagarden Blues and Rain”
A first look at Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine, with Stephen Wolfram. This is uncut audio from David Weinberger’s 55 minute interview with Stephen for Radio Berkman. Look for the more concise version in next week’s episode. Enjoy!
It is a foregone conclusion in media circles that journalism as we know it is, or soon will be, kaput. As the huge machine that is 20th Century journalism is dismantled, long before the vultures get a chance to pick at the bones of the last remaining printing press, a class of media creators, critics, and consumers are getting a chance to look over the damage and see what is worth preserving, what is worth building upon, and what is worth throwing away. Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is one of those multi-hyphenate creator/critic/consumers. In a recent submission for the Media Re:Public series, Dan suggested a vision for a participatory media, including five principles that could guide journalism in the 21st Century.
The Reference Section: Follow Dan’s Blog
More on the “5 Principles” Dan’s recent presentation at the Berkman Center EVEN more on the “5 Principles” CC-licensed music this week: Neurowaxx: “Pop Circus” Podington Bear: “The Squeaky Song”
If you’ve been following the Facebook Terms of Service flap you probably have some idea of how big a deal a company’s terms of service can be. If Facebook were a country they would be the sixth largest in the world, just by the sheer number of citizens they can claim. But how a citizen of Facebook participates in society – at least in the microcosm of society that is Facebook – is subject to a confusing and overlapping set of legal infrastructures – not just the Terms of Service Facebook sets out. Gillian Hadfield a law and economics professor at the University of Southern California argues that Facebook and other companies in the new economy are inhibited by current mechanisms for producing law, and need more leeway in developing their own legal infrastructures. Is Professor Hadfield looking to put the government out of a job? Not exactly. Listen to today’s episode to find out what private lawmaking really means, and how it could power innovation.
The CIA’s Intellipedia project has brought the Wikipedia concept into the the highly secretive intelligence sector. How does it work? Will using a technology that encourages openness and collaboration affect the culture of the agency? Do you think they have an entry for Area 51? Two principals from the Intellipedia project, Don Burke and Sean Dennehy, chatted with David Weinberger this week about some of the challenges and advantages that the technology could have on our nation’s most secretive agency.
What do you call a web-enabled political system? Dot-Communism? A Meme-ocracy? Either way, US President Barack Obama has been up to some interesting tricks in building .gov’s web presence. A memo (linked here) that came out of the Oval Office in late January ordered all federal agencies not only to err on the side of transparency in their dealings, but to embark on ambitious new web-enabled methods for bringing in citizen participation. President Obama himself led one of the first online townhalls in which Americans submitted and voted on over 100,000 questions, which Obama then responded to in more traditional setting. Gene Koo, a Berkman Fellow, posted some advice on his blog for the Obama administration on how they could improve this process in the future, and potentially build a more web-savvy democracy. We caught up with him last week to get his thoughts on this fascinating topic.
The tech world is an alphabet soup of acronyms referencing all kinds of fascinating concepts. But “VRM” might actually have implications for YOU as a consumer. This week, in a special extended episode of Radio Berkman, one of the innovators of Vendor Rights Management (VRM) gives us an inside look at how the relationship between customer and retailer could become more efficient, practical, and personal. For those worried about how the future of commerce, media, and the internet could play out this episode is a must listen.
Crowdsourcing has been touted as a future business model for everything from design, to advertising, to reporting, to data analysis. But is it for real, or just trendy? Jeff Howe, of Wired Magazine, put a stamp on the phenomenon with his 2006 book Crowdsourcing, and has been gathering evidence for its development as the future of a participatory economy. He sat down with David Weinberger to go into detail.
With newspapers shuttering left and right, revenues plummeting, and readers spiking in all directions for their news content, journalists are very quick to turn the mirror on themselves these days. This kind of morbid narcissism is not without purpose. In fact, many journalists, editors and publishers understand that their survival depends not just on soul-searching, but finding some accurate data on how the stories they produce are read and spread. Last week saw the launch of a powerful new tool for news analysis: Mediacloud.org. Frequent guest and Mediacloud principal Steven Schultze joins us in the studio once again to talk about what media cloud is, and why it matters.
Could the “Digital Revolution” in China lead to an actual political revolution? With greater openness, communication, and debate taking place among the 1/5th of Chinese citizens on the web, the potential is greater now than ever before. But our guest this week, Rebecca MacKinnon, suggests that the scenarios for China’s political and digital future are more diverse than they may seem. And can offer some interesting lessons for the democracies who are eager to use the web in governance.
Is scholarly research being held hostage by the academy? Some seem to think so, and some are doing something about it, by creating a new model for the scholarly publishing industry – called Open Access. The Open Access model offers scholarly work free of charge and free of copyright online. However, achieving Open Access may be easier said than done. Last week Peter Suber, Senior Researcher at SPARC gave a great presentation at Harvard University (check it out here), so we thought we’d pick his brain for a bit on the battle for Open Access.
The technological advancements of the past twenty years have rendered the future of the library as a physical space, at least, as uncertain as it has ever been. The information that libraries were once built to house in the form of books and manuscripts can now be accessed in the purely digital realm, as evidenced by initiatives like the Digital Public Library of America, which convenes for the second time this Friday in San Francisco. But libraries still have profound cultural significance, indicating that even if they are no longer necessary for storing books they will continue to exist in some altered form. Radio Berkman host David Weinberger postulated in his book Too Big To Know that the book itself is no longer an appropriate knowledge container – it has been supplanted by the sprawling knowledge networks of the internet. The book’s subtitle is “Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.” Inspired by the work of Harvard Graduate School of Design students in Biblioteca 2: Library Test Kitchen – who spent the semester inventing and building library innovations ranging from nap carrels to curated collections displayed on book trucks to digital welcome mats – we turned the microphone around and had library expert Matthew Battles ask David, “When the smartest person in the room is the room, how do we design the room?” Matthew Battles is the Managing Editor and Curatorial Practice Fellow at the Harvard metaLAB. He wrote Library: an Unquiet History and a biography of Harvard’s Widener Library. David Weinberger is the author of Too Big To Know and a senior researcher at the Berkman Center. He is also the co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab.
Is there room in the music industry for middle-class musicians? Friend of the show Nancy Baym brought together three career performer/songwriters who all stumbled on the same analogy for how musicians can “make it” in the digital age: that of Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs). Kristin Hersh, Zoe Keating, and Erin McKeown discuss what models have worked for them, and the unorthodox ways they’ve learned to make a living as artists.
This week’s guest, Juan Carlos de Martin, readily admits that he is only the latest in a long line of thinkers to portend the end of the university as we know it. He almost gleefully cites Thomas Edison as one of his most notable predecessors. But Juan Carlos may be the first to be right. When Juan Carlos began his research tracing the history of the university – an institution that has barely changed since the founding of the University of Bologna nearly a millennium ago – he was optimistic about the democratizing effects of digital technology. However, Juan Carlos now says he has identified several persuasive arguments against the University that together could topple the ivory tower. David Weinberger interviewed Juan Carlos – a Berkman Fellow and co-founder of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society in Torino, Italy – about what Juan Carlos has called the “perfect storm” on the University’s horizon.
We all know by now that SOPA/PIPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect IP Act, respectively — died a sudden death in Congress in January. When online giants like Wikipedia and Tumblr went dark on January 18th of this year to protest the measures Congressional switchboards were overwhelmed with calls to just drop it. But how did a set of measures like SOPA/PIPA, otherwise unheard of and generally projected to pass into law quietly, get suddenly thrust into the limelight? Field producer Melissa Galvez brings us these excerpts from a panel at the Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where internet and/or politics experts Susan Crawford, Micah Sifry, Nicco Mele, and Elaine Kamarck discuss how the grassroots campaign to bring down SOPA/PIPA was built, and what it says about organizing on the internet.
Technology has made us all kinds of promises when it comes to transforming the way we learn — not least of which was the promise to break the “digital divide.” The ease of communication promised by the web would allow the economically disenfranchised to have access to ideas and collaborative resources more commonly found in affluent schools. So it is assumed. In fact there is some evidence showing that some educational technologies are used less effectively in poor schools than in rich ones. Today’s guest, Berkman Fellow Justin Reich, gathered data on the usage of some 180,000 publicly accessible wikis used for collaboration and education in school settings for his report The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K-12 Schools: Leveraging Web 2.0 Data Warehouses to Assess Quality and Equity in Online Learning Environments. What he found was that wikis were generally less helpful to poor schools than conventional wisdom might have us believe. He talked to David Weinberger about his findings.
When the net competes with family, friends, school, and mass media, how do kids tell truth from the garbage? Researchers here at the Berkman Center sought to find out, and came back with some fascinating findings.
We sat down this week with four people intimately involved with the research: Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Nathaniel Levy, and Ned Crowley.
Until everyone started using the net to date sociologists didn’t have much information to go by when trying to figure out the beautiful process of human courtship. Only things like this. But dating sites are the 2nd leading source for modern relationships. And the data collected by dating sites sheds some light on how the heck people are getting together in the first place. Berkman Fellow, Harvard PhD Candidate, and Friend of the Show, Kevin Lewis dug into some of this data and shares his amazing findings on how folks are pairing up online.
We’re so easily influenced by the habits and interests of our friends, you might think that social networks like Facebook would only magnify the power of peer pressure. But recent research from Harvard sociologists Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez, and Jason Kaufman shows that people are more likely to stick with their own interests than we might think. From the abstract of the report Social selection and peer influence in an online social network: "Using data on the Facebook activity of a cohort of college students over 4 years, we find that students who share certain tastes in music and in movies, but not in books, are significantly likely to befriend one another. Meanwhile, we find little evidence for the diffusion of tastes among Facebook friends—except for tastes in classical/jazz music." So while younger folks are likely to build friendships based on certain cultural tastes they’re not likely to warm to their friends tastes so easily. This is surprising, say the researchers, given previous data and assumptions about how tastes spread virally on the net. David Weinberger chatted with Kevin Lewis to get more details on this study.
Two weeks ago, the Berkman Center co-sponsored the third – and, we learned, final! – ROFLCon. For the n00bz, ROFLCon is a conference named after the acronym for “rolling on the floor, laughing” and devoted to celebrating internet culture. Friend of the Show Tim Hwang co-founded the event in 2008 when he and Christina Xu invited Tron Guy to Cambridge.
Both ROFLCon and internet culture have evolved since then, so we sent producer Frances Harlow on location to ask attendees, “What are memes, and do they really matter?”
In today's episode we wrap up our coverage of last week's Rethink Music conference with a conversation between guest host Chris Bavitz and Kristin Thomson.
In addition to her work as community organizer, social policy researcher, entrepreneur and musician, Kristin is a consultant at the Future of Music Coalition, which recently unveiled the findings from its massive Artist Revenue Streams project designed to answer the question, "How are today’s musicians earning money?"
After interviewing more than eighty composers and performers, conducting a dozen financial case studies, and distributing an online survey to more than 5,000 musicians, the Future of Music Coalition has identified no less than 42 distinct revenue streams ranging from karaoke licensing to merchandise sales.
Friend of the show, Assistant Director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, and lecturer at Harvard Law School Chris asked Kristin about her research and its implications for contemporary musicians.
Dave Herlihy currently teaches music industry classes at Northeastern University and operates his own practice specializing in entertainment law, intellectual property, copyright, trademark, licensing, and new media.
But twenty-five years ago he was the lead singer of O Positive, a Boston-area band poised on the brink of a major label record deal.
Friend of the show, Assistant Director of Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, and lecturer at Harvard Law School Chris Bavitz interviewed Dave about his band’s trajectory from being the “best band in the basement” to appearing on the Billboard charts (and what came after).
Dave also offers his insight into the role of record labels in the YouTube era, and how he would resolve media licensing issues if he were an enlightened despot, and how to get famous.
The #Kony2012 video, and accompanying campaign and meme, has done a lot to raise awareness.
Of WHAT exactly, it’s hard to tell.
The intended target for attention — the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony — is certainly a big one.
But the video was flawed. In favor of simplicity it glossed over crucial facts and advocated passionately for questionable solutions, in the end bringing more critical attention back to Invisible Children, the charismatic American youth group behind the campaign.
Most of all the explosion of Kony 2012 has raised awareness about sensitivities around the politics of intervention in Africa, and the utility of digital activism and fundraising for awareness campaigns in the United States.
Today we hear from four guests:
Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan journalist, about where Joseph Kony is now, and how Ugandans are responding to the new attention Gilad Lotan, a network researcher, about what he found when he dug into the data on how the Kony2012 meme spread Ethan Zuckerman, a founder of Global Voices, on whether simple narratives can ever help solve complex issues and Amanda Taub, a blogger and human rights expert, on what Invisible Children could have done differently.
More, including our up-to-date list of the most thoughtful posts on Kony, Uganda, Central Africa, Invisible Children, and digital activism, here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2012/03/23/rb-195-can-100-million-viewers-save-a-child/
This week at Radio Berkman we tried something new.
During our recent interview with Berkman Fellow Justin Reich about his report The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K-12 Schools: Leveraging Web 2.0 Data Warehouses to Assess Quality and Equity in Online Learning Environments, we learned that only one percent of educational wikis succeed in creating the kind of multimedia, collaborative learning environment we have come to associate with open educational resources like PBWikis and Wikispaces.
Justin’s findings, and their implications, are so intriguing that we decided it was time to go into the field and do some investigative work of our own. Radio Berkman wanted to know: Who is making those successful wikis and how?
Producer Frances Harlow spent a day at Thayer Academy in Braintree, Massachusetts sitting in on professional development sessions and interviewing instructors, including
Director of Studies and History Department Head (and classroom wiki “missionary”) Matt Dunne Veteran History teacher Norma Atkinson Listen to what she found and be sure to let us know what you think of this Radio Berkman experiment!
This week we tear apart the difference between Truth, Fact, and Evidence, and the quiet, but irreplaceable, role of the humble factchecker in our media with:
-Author/factchecker Jim Fingal on the Lifespan of a Fact -Former GQ intern and factchecker Gillian Brassil -Veteran Atlantic Monthly factchecking department head Yvonne Rolzhausen -David Weinberger, author of the recent book Too Big To Know
From February 4th, 2009
A first glimpse into the challenges and opportunities the Berkman Center faces in 2009, with the Center’s new Executive Director, Urs Gasser.
CC-licensed music this week: Brad Sucks – “Gasoline” Greg Williams – “Teagarden Blues and Rain”