MediaBerkman

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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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.

Download the MP3

…or download the OGG audio format!

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.

Download the MP3

…or download the OGG audio format!

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.

Click Above for Video

Author and Professor of Public Policy Viktor Mayer-Schönberger believes that digital memory is a little too perfect. Every word you post on the web, every picture, every video, tweet, and email is set in stone, archived, permanently findable. Like the proverbial elephant, the digital world doesn’t forget.

There are incredible benefits to this. And there might be consequences as well, ranging from invasion of privacy, to the impairment of human memory.

David Weinberger spoke with Viktor about some of these consequences, and how we might help our machines learn to forget.

Listen:
or download
…also in Ogg!

The Reference Section:
Viktor on the web
Viktor’s book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
A Full interview with Viktor on CBC’s Spark

CC-licensed music this week:
Neurowaxx: Carioca
Jaspertine: Pling

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See a partial transcript after the jump.

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Radio Berkman is proud to announce a new collaboration with Spark, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s excellent radio show.

The program, hosted by Nora Young, brings together essays, stories, interviews, and experimental pieces exploring the fascinating intersections between technology and culture.

We’ve been a longtime fan of Spark’s podcast (click here to subscribe). Their shows cover a lot of the Berkman Center’s favorite ground (check out some of our favorite episodes here and here).

So this week take a listen to their most recent episode, and you’ll hear our story on NBC’s experience with digital pirates. Yarr!

Keep your ears peeled for more!

Lee Dirks, Director of Education & Scholarly Communications in Microsoft’s External Research division proposes a vision for the future of research and the need for semantic-oriented computing by exploring eResearch projects that have successfully applied relevant technologies. He suggests that a software + service model with scientific services delivered from the cloud will become an increasingly accepted model for research.

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…or download the OGG audio format!

Liveblogged by David Weinberger

This event was co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Harvard Business School Knowledge and Library Services, Harvard Law School Library, and the Office for Scholarly Communication.

The hype shows no signs of abating. Now that people have moved from just talking-about-Twitter, to the more meta talking-about-talking-about-Twitter, we here at Radio Berkman decided to take on the topic from our own perspective and see if there is possibly anything new left to be said about the popular microblogging service.

Turns out there is.

On today’s episode:

• An interview with @birdchick about Twitter’s corollaries in the natural world;

• An interview with @zephoria about ReTweeting, and stepping outside of the conversation on Twitter;

• A much anticipated debate on Twitter’s “revolutionariness” between the Berkman Center’s amazing summer interns. (To hear the full debate, click here.)

Listen: or download
…also in Ogg!

CC-licensed music this week:

Coconut Monkeyrocket: “Accidental Beatnik”
Morgantj: Café Connection
Neurowaxx: “Pop Circus”
Podington Bear: “The Squeaky Song”
RAC Remix: Zero (orig. Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

The Reference Section:
Twitter Grew Up in July
Bird Chick
Connect to danah boyd’s research and blog
Our debaters: Rebekah, Sawyer, Catherine, and Chris. Andrew Moshirnia has not yet joined Twitter publicly.

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You don’t need to be a crowned Ranger class master hacker to sneak into someone’s email or facebook account these days. Which means that you’re not simply being a nervous nellie if you’re worried about security.

In fact, users of public WiFi should be worried. If you use WiFi to access some of the most popular email and social networking services, like, gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, and facebook, your account information floats around in the air, often completely unsecured.

You want some more fear with your coffee? Chris Soghoian, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, took a look into WiFi and account security to find out just how scary the situation is.

Listen:
or download
…also in Ogg!

The Reference Section:
See Chris’ Open Letter to Google
How to protect your gmail
Secure all your google utilities in Firefox
Chris is soon to be a free agent but his research is needed! Hire him!

CC-licensed music this week:
General Fuzz – Cream
Arslkhan – Love Odyssey

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See a partial transcript after the jump.

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The online labor market Amazon Mechnical Turk (or AMT) offers a controversial example of Crowdsourcing by allowing employers to offer micro-payments to a global pool of “Turkers” in exchange for work on small “Human Intelligence Tasks” (called HITs). Aaron Shaw, Research Fellow at the Berkman Center and a Ph.D student at UC Berkeley discusses who’s using AMT, its implications for social scientists, the future of labor markets, and life on the Internet as we know it.

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…or download the OGG audio format!

Please Note: This talk incorporates research-in-progress from the Berkman Center’s Online Cooperation Research in collaboration with Daniel Chen and John Horton. After the event was over, Aaron realized that he neglected to explicitly acknowledge Chen and Horton’s invaluable role in the project during the presentation. Aaron feels terrible about this and sincerely apologizes. He also hopes that you’ll visit their websites (links above) and read at least one of their papers. Daniel and John’s contributions to the field of experimental research on online labor markets include (a) recognizing that AMT could serve as a venue for experimental studies; (b) conducting the earliest labor market experiments on AMT; (c) solving a bunch of difficult problems so that they could make valid causal inference based on the results of these experiments.