MediaBerkman

The problem of civic engagement is often un­derstood as a lack of participation. People do not show up to meetings, they do not engage in their civic institutions or communicate with decision-makers.

The Engagement Game Lab has developed an online game called Community PlanIt—which has been played in six distinct planning processes ranging from urban planning in Detroit and Philadelphia to education planning in Boston—to explore how game mechanics and social interaction can move local civic processes beyond transactive participation towards a sustained, reflective mode of civic interaction.

In this talk, Eric Gordon—researcher, game designer, and Berkman Fellow—explores the unique affordances of Community PlanIt for building social trust, engaging youth in civic life, and developing shared local narratives.

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With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, organizations and researchers have developed and distributed a variety of tools to assist Internet users to both monitor and circumvent such censorship.

In this talk, Jon Penney—Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab and Berkman Fellow—examines some of the international law and politics of such censorship resistance activities through three case studies involving past global communications censorship and information conflicts—telegraph cable cutting and suppression, high frequency radio jamming, and direct broadcast satellite blocking—and the world community’s response to these conflicts.

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On March 5th, 2012, the American nonprofit, Invisible Children, published a video called “Kony 2012″ on the social video-sharing network, Youtube. Within six days the video was dubbed the “most viral video in history,” beating out pop artists Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Beyonce’s music videos in how quickly it hit 100 million views.

In this talk Ruha Devanesan — Executive Director of the Internet Bar Organization and Berkman Fellow — explores thoughts on the successes and failures of the initial Kony 2012 campaign, and the way in which Invisible Children has responded to criticism and adapted its messaging to ask what lessons can be learned by the human rights advocacy community from Kony 2012 and Invisible Children’s subsequent actions.

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Ghana, a small country on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, is the size of Oregon. Its entire population is only double that of New York City. Yet what is unfolding there matters to the future of the Internet.

In this talk, Jenna Burrell — Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley — draws from a 6-year period of ethnographic research (2004-2010) on youth in Accra’s Internet cafes — where the primary activity was cultivating relationships with foreigners in chat rooms and dating sites as these users sought to enact a more cosmopolitan self — and considers how network security and network administration are shaped not simply by an impersonal technical logic or even commercial interests, but also by cultural biases and parochialism that violate, perhaps unwittingly, these early ideals of the Internet.

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In what ways do we reward the authentic learning and work that young people do that is not validated and evaluated by our educational institutions? In this highly connected world that is powered by what we need when we need it, is school really enough?

Berkman Fellow and Engagement Game Lab director Eric Gordon leads a panel discussion on lessons learned about how youth are experiencing and pursuing education from the new documentary “Is School Enough?,” including Urs Gasser (Berkman Center director), Sandra Cortesi (Youth & Media Lab lead fellow), and Reynol Junco (Berkman fellow), along with Sierra Goldstein (a student featured in the documentary) and the film’s director Stephen Brown.

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Activist Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) actions such as Anonymous’ “Operation Payback” owe their success to the role of tool design and media coverage.

Through a close reading of changes in tool interface and functionality over several iterations, Molly Sauter—Berkman Center fellow and graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT—considers the evolution of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) DDoS tool from an inwardly-focused community tool to one which engaged with a larger population. She also demonstrates how Anonymous helped reframe DDoS actions from a tool of direct action to a tool of media manipulation and identity construction.

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In what ways is the Chinese Internet a better source for grassroots Chinese sentiment than traditional quotes and sources? In what ways is it worse? More broadly, what best practices can and should journalists use when mining social media for sentiment?

David Wertime—co-founder and co-editor of Tea Leaf Nation, an English-language online magazine that synthesizes and analyzes Chinese social media—discusses how his team analyzes Chinese language social media to discern trends in grassroots sentiment.

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In the Internet era, a very few companies control our information destiny.

In this talk, and in her new book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, Susan Crawford—a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation policy—demonstrates how deregulatory changes in policy have created a communications crisis in America.

The consequences: Tens of millions of Americans are being left behind, people pay too much for too little Internet access, and speeds are slow.

But everyday people can change this story—and what happens in the year ahead could change the game for good.

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Armed with little more than a modest smartphone (mostly even ordinary phones) and an Internet subscription that will permit only a fair access to the mobile GPRS/EDGE, Nigerian young people went into the 2011 elections with a new wave of enthusiasm and interest.

In light of the renewed hope and confidence, and the desire to get things right, several civil society organizations established election monitoring platforms via SMS, twitter, websites, blogs, facebook, telephone lines etc. One particular organization recruited volunteers and got itself embedded within the INEC systems to promote a “two-way communication between INEC and its stakeholders”.

What evolved was a media-tracking centre established to assess the robust blend of traditional and new media during the election period. It was an interesting trend to see how social media, for the first time, was adopted and, quite interestingly, adapted, to ensure credibility of the electoral process.

During this presentation, Oluwaseun Odewale — a trained chemist with a combination of nine years local and international work experiences in social and development work in the West African sub-region, and Berkman Center Fellow — showcases the Nigeria experience, highlighting what worked and what didn’t; specific instances of how social media interventions prevented rigging; how the elections has helped the growth of use of social media, the patterns of usage during and after the elections; and, how traditional media has adjusted to social media practice.

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Citizen video in Southeast Asia has exploded in recent times, and has come to play a significant role in national and regional politics, documenting spectacular events, spearheading campaigns and uncovering scandals.

In this discussion, Andrew Lowenthal — Co-Founder and Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific human rights and environmental video project — outlines EngageMedia’s approach to video4change and their work in the region, in particular looking at West Papua, (a remote region of Indonesia that has been waging an independence campaign for more than 40 years), the development of regional, cross-border and multilingual video networks, and the effect and possibility of the internet and online media to generate new post-national political configurations and collaborations.

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