MediaBerkman

Calestous Juma, Professor of the Practice of International Development and Director of the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School, explores the implications of high speed internet for Africa’s capacity to expand the global market for access devices, creation of content, and development of markets.

Click here for notes on the event from Ethan Zuckerman.

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Larry Lessig, Professor of Law and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society speaks at the Berkman Center workshop “Alternative Approaches to Open Digital Libraries in the Shadow of the Google Book Search Settlement” held July 31, 2009.

Sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Harvard Law School Library, and Professors Charles Nesson, John Palfrey and Phil Malone.

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The proposed Google Book Search settlement creates the opportunity for unprecedented access by the public, scholars, libraries and others to a digital library containing millions of books assembled by major research libraries. But the settlement is controversial, in large part because this access is limited in major ways: instead of being truly open, this new digital library will be controlled by a single company, Google, and a newly created Book Rights Registry consisting of representatives of authors and publishers; it will include millions of so-called “orphan works” that cannot legally be included in any competing digitization and access effort, and it will be available to readers only in the United States.

Alexander Macgillivray, Deputy General Counsel for Products and Intellectual Property at Google (and soon to be General Counsel of Twitter) chats about the Google Book Search Settlement, its intricacies, pros, and cons, and responds to provocative questions and comments.

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Where in the world are people using Creative Commons licenses? How much content is licensed under Creative Commons and what are the individual, social and cultural factors that influence adoption? Also, what happens after content is made available for remixing under an open license? Giorgos Cheliotis, Assistant Professor of Communications and New Media at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the National University of Singapore (NUS, addresses these questions and presents findings from the CC-Monitor project.

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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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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.

**PLEASE NOTE: The sound quality for this event recording is imperfect. Portions have been edited or refined for improved clarity.**

The Cluetrain Manifesto, posted in April, 1999, immediately became a touchstone in the digital culture wars. Its four authors – Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger – denounced the mainstream media’s portrayal of the Web as an extension of business-as-usual into a medium cheaper than paper and TV time. The Web is a conversation. And — in Cluetrain’s most famous formulation — so are networked markets.

On the tenth anniversary of The Cluetrain Manifesto, co-authors David Weinberger and Doc Searls sit down with Jonathan Zittrain to discuss how much of their vision for the web has become reality, and what we should expect for the next ten years.

Ben Wikler from Avaaz.org discusses how nimbly aggregating small actions by individuals around the world can build effective online campaigns for issues like conflict, human rights, and climate change.

Much enthusiasm surrounds the opportunities made available by digital media for people to express themselves and participate in the public sphere without having to go through traditional gatekeepers. While the enthusiasm about new opportunities is thus warranted, little is known about who is actually participating, who is not, and what participation patterns may imply for the democratizing potential of new tools and services. This talk draws on unique survey data collected in 2009 to explore these questions.

Beth Kolko, Berkman Center fellow and Associate Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, examines what are essentially fictional definitions (what is “the Internet,” “an Internet user,” a “mobile phone”) and discusses how the same collection of circuits and memory can occupy varying cultural meanings across contexts, particularly in resource-constrained environments. She presents a series of case studies of how technology design addresses (or ignores) differences in function and cultural meaning, and the implications of those differences for design.

Photo CC by flickr user arcticpenguin

Lewis Hyde traces the roots of the second enclosure (it goes back at least to the invention of printing); he describes traditional forms of resistance (such as the useful old custom of “beating the bounds”); and he outlines what he takes to be the “third enclosure,” the many ways in which market forces now capture not just known cultural commons but the unknown as well, the uncharted wilderness of nature, the wilderness of the human mind, and even the wilderness of the internet.