MediaBerkman

Joe Karaganis discusses findings from a forthcoming six-country study of media piracy, including work on Russia, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. The study provides a rare empirical look at the organization of piracy and enforcement in developing countries, and explores the transformation of both as the optical disk economy give way to digital distribution.

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How could the transparency of personal information available online erode the rule of law? And what should government be doing about it – if anything? Joel R. Reidenberg – Professor of Law and the Founding Academic Director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham Law School – explores the erosion of the boundary between public and private information on the Internet.

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Berkman Faculty Fellow and HLS Visiting Professor Julie Cohen explores the effects of expanding copyright, pervasive surveillance, and the increasingly opaque design of network architectures in the emerging networked information society. Based on a chapter from her forthcoming book, Cohen argues that “access to knowledge” is a necessary but insufficient condition for human flourishing, and adds two additional conditions.

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Unlike telephone conversations and videoconferences, avatars – representations of people in virtual environments – have the ability to control their physical appearance and behavioral actions in the eyes of their conversational partners, strategically enhancing or hiding features and nonverbal signals in real-time. Jeremy Bailenson – founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab – explores the manners in which avatars change the nature of remote communication, and how these transformations can impact the ability to influence others in social and professional contexts.

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Unlike telephone conversations and videoconferences, avatars – representations of people in virtual environments – have the ability to control their physical appearance and behavioral actions in the eyes of their conversational partners, strategically enhancing or hiding features and nonverbal signals in real-time. Jeremy Bailenson – founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab – explores the manners in which avatars change the nature of remote communication, and how these transformations can impact the ability to influence others in social and professional contexts.

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Though online media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook often make the promise to openly and impartially host all content, they actively make decisions about where the edges of these platforms should be: what should and should not appear, how content should be organized, what should be featured or squirreled away, and how it should be patrolled.

Tarleton Gillespie – assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School, and author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture – sees this array of interventions together as structuring contemporary public discourse, and situates them in the history of commercial obligations around free speech.

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Advertising pays for a significant portion of online content and services. But in contrast to other forms of content and service provision, it expects a return on investment despite not being backed by any kind of legal structure or binding agreement, resulting in anxiety on the part of the advertising industry. Fernando Bermejo – Associate Professor of Communication at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain – attempts to draw a map of online advertising, explain its anxiety reduction methods, and explore the consequences of the use of those methods on the ecology of online communication.

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8 years ago, Brett Glass — an electrical engineer, inventor, and technology columnist — established LARIAT, the first terrestrial wireless Internet service provider (WISP), in Laramie, Wyoming. What’s it like to roll up your sleeves and roll out high speed connectivity to underserved and unserved areas with, literally, one’s bare hands? What are the logistics? What are the challenges? In this talk, Brett explores these questions and others.

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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society hosted, partnered on, and generated a heaping helping of fascinating talks and pieces of media in 2009 – and tens of thousands of YOU watched, listened, discussed, and linked to our media – which just goes to show how big of year its been for internet, society, and technology! In honor of the Berkman Center’s 11th year, we take a look back at 2009 and see what you thought were 11 of the most interesting topics.

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A nation-wide survey of 1,812 parents of web-savvy children shows parental support for various strategies to protect their children from negative effects. But strategies resulting in the least disagreement from the children in this survey included those that empower the youth to protect themselves, as well as legal consequences or suspension from school for people who misbehave online. Sahara Byrne, Assistant Professor at Cornell University, gives an in-depth tour of some of the results of this exhaustive study.

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