MediaBerkman

Once, personal technology and the Internet meant that we didn’t need permission to compute, communicate and innovate. Now, governments and tech companies are systematically restricting our liberties, and creating an online surveillance state. In many cases, however, we’re letting it happen, by trading freedom for convenience and (often the illusion of) security. In this talk, Dan Gillmor—a founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication—suggests steps we can take as individuals to be more secure and free, and to take back the permissions we’re losing.

An outline of his talk can be found here.

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5.9 billion people now use mobile phones, of which 1.1 billion are smartphones. With this kind of penetration smartphones will empower behavioral scientists to collect terabytes of ecologically valid data from vast global samples—easily, quickly, and remotely, transforming the behavioral sciences even more profoundly than PCs and brain imaging did. Smartphones can record where people are, what they are doing, and what they can see and hear. They can run interactive surveys, tests, and experiments through touch screens and Bluetooth peripherals.

Geoffrey Miller—Visiting Professor at the NYU Stern Business School—discusses what smartphones can do now, and will be able to do in the near future, as research platforms, and the new opportunities for understanding human nature and culture.

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The power of big data—analyzing huge swaths of information to uncover insights and make predictions that were largely impossible in the past—is poised to transform business and society. Yet there is a dark side. Privacy is eroded like never before. And a new harm emerges: predictions about human behavior that may result in penalties prior to actual the infraction being committed. In this talk Viktor Mayer-Schönberger—Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford—and Kenneth Neil Cukier—Data Editor of The Economist—take a look at big data’s power, the dangers it poses and how to address them.

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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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