MediaBerkman

Newly empowered musicians now find themselves juggling dozens of career-related responsibilities, from booking their own shows to composing witty tweets. How are today’s musicians balancing it all and, even more critical, how have these changes impacted their earning capacity?

Kristin Thomson — independent record label owner and Consultant for the Future of Music Coalition — and Erin McKeown — internationally known musician and Berkman Fellow — discuss the changing landscape for musicians and music fans, focussing on how musicians are managing their assets, building teams and allocating their time in an increasingly networked world, and drawing on data collected through FMC’s groundbreaking Artist Revenue Streams project, a multi-method, cross-genre examination of musicians’ and composers’ revenue streams in the US.

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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.

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Knowledge grows, but it also contracts as outmoded facts and theories are replaced with new ones. Dennis Tenen — a literary scholar, recovering software engineer, and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society — discusses our intuitions about knowledge domains and the methods by which such intuitions could be modeled empirically.

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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.

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Virginia Heffernan — columnist, national correspondent for Yahoo News, and author of the soon-to-be-released Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet — discusses analog culture, digital culture and what’s next.

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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.

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Every day we hear about privacy issues surrounding Facebook, Google, mobile apps, smartphones, Big Data and data brokers.

The Berkman Center’s John Palfrey engages Julie Brill — Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission who focuses on policy and enforcement initiatives in the area of online privacy and data security — in a conversation on privacy and digital communications technology.

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The historic events of the last year, from Egypt to #Occupy to the SOPA debate, have breathed new life into the idea of open government fueled by technology. At the same time, a new spectre of new cutting edge surveillance states has arisen, where digital autocracies apply filtering, propaganda and tracking technologies to suppress speech, distort public opinion and capture or kill dissidents and protestors. In this talk on the power of platforms, Alexander B. Howard — the Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O’Reilly Media — talks about where the principles and technologies that built the Internet and World Wide Web are being integrated into government and society — and by whom.

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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

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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:

• Author/factchecker Jim Fingal on the Lifespan of a Fact
• Former GQ intern and factchecker Gillian Brassil on how factcheckers get paid to watch True Blood
• Veteran Atlantic Monthly factchecking department head Yvonne Rolzhausen on the underinvestment of media resources for factchecking
• David Weinberger, author of the recent book Too Big To Know on what a fact is and why they don’t make for good storytelling

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