MediaBerkman

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.

Excerpt:

“When culture reaches the point of ephemerality which allows it to flow in the way it does now, the only way to enforce (current intellectual property rules) is an army. Hopefully we are not there yet.”
- Lawrence Liang

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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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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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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.

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…also in Ogg!

Creative Commons music used this week from Jeremiah Jacobs. Photo credit to moocat.

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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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Different brain systems are used when one produces lies in different ways, such as by fabricating lies spontaneously “on the fly” versus fabricating them on the basis of a previously memorized story. This discovery indicates that there is no single “lie center” in the brain, and makes it unlikely that a single neural pattern of activation can distinguish deception from telling the truth. Stephen M. Kosslyn – Dean of Social Science and John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Associate Psychologist in the Department of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital – explains and discusses the significance of this discovery.

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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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