MediaBerkman

Nathan Eagle, Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, infers behavioral dynamics on a broad spectrum of scales using technology; from risky behavior in a group of MIT freshman, to cholera outbreaks in Rwanda and wealth in the UK, to disease transmission and slum formations in East Africa. Though the analytical techniques are sophisticated, the tools used are as simple as a mobile phone. Ultimately these insights can be used to actively improve the lives of the billions of people who generate this data and the societies in which they live.

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Berkman Fellow David Weinberger investigates the origin of modern “information”, trying to understand what about it led us to embrace it as the dominant–paradigmatic–way of understanding ourselves and our world. David Weinberger will present an informal sketch of a direction, suggesting that we leaped into information because it reflected a long-held but squirrely metaphysics.

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Ellen Goodman of Rutgers University School of Law and Jake Shapiro, Executive Director of the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), discuss public media’s role in providing public discourses, advancing democratic capabilities, and empowering publics to communicate and organize. The two investigate whether the United States has a system of public media that is able to support the kinds of widespread, high value, noncommercial, and productive communications essential for democratic functions.

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“Walled gardens” is a common term for systems that limit the entrance and exit of certain kinds of data. It is a deceptively simple metaphor that relies on the existence of a shared set of assumptions about what gardens are, what walls are, and what it means to build and maintain them. In this talk, Goodman extends the walled garden metaphor for digital spaces by comparing it to everyday experiences of more literal ones: urban community gardens.

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A book talk with professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger who examines the technology that’s facilitating the end of forgetting in his book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age”. Mayer-Schönberger argues that in our quest for perfect digital memories where we can store everything from recipes and family photographs to work emails and personal information, we’ve put ourselves in danger of losing a very human quality—the ability and privilege of forgetting.

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It’s been a busy week at the Berkman Center, so we had to forgo a new podcast this week. But have no fear, we did not forget you! We dusted off a recent classic from our archive by popular demand: “Episode 124, What the Heck is a Commons?”

David Bollier, author of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, explains where the notion of the Commons came from, and how it is evolving in the digital age.

Enjoy, and we’ll see you next week!

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Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through a dynamic visualization of stories, data, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main in the United States. Two of the project’s founders, Jesse Shapins and James Burns, explain the origins of the project and invite feedback.

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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?

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CC-licensed music this week:
Neurowaxx: Pop Circus
General Fuzz: Warm Steel

The Reference Section:
Russell Neuman’s bio
Russell Neuman’s research
Russell Neuman’s recent talk Theories of Media Evolution at the Berkman Center

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John Clippinger and Oliver Goodenough of the Berkman Center’s Law Lab discuss the progress made this year by the Law Lab – especially three specific projects that develop new digital institutions and research tools to foster innovation and deepen our understanding of trust, transparency and human cooperation.

Liveblogging from the talk by David Weinberger

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Television recorders are going online. Device manufacturers are starting to produce consumer devices and software that can be connected to Internet at consumers’ homes. New models of innovation are starting to emerge. This talk proposes the social enrichment of TV offerings may prove to create disruptive innovation to an industry accustomed to control the consumption of content.

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