John Palfrey

Our session on Digital Natives as part of the unconference day 2 is focused on Myth-Busting. We put up on the conference wiki a bunch of myths online that we’ve been working to bust (or to affirm). Our mode is to put these myths to the attendees, see which ones they would like to discuss, and dig in where the group is most interested.

My co-author (of a forthcoming book, Born Digital) and friend Urs Gasser is opening up with a framework for study of the Digital Natives issues we’re focused on. His steps include a descriptive, analytical, evaluative, and prescriptive.

Of the eight myths we posted, the one that got the most votes and comments from the group was about wasting time online. Precisely, it was this one that got people going: “Digital Natives are wasting time online. –> Young people are learning, gaining skills, and becoming collaborative, critical and informed members of society through their online and digital engagements.”

It was fortuitous to be in Langdell North classroom at HLS for this discussion. It was one of the rooms renovated in the late 1990s by the HLS administration with Ethernet jacks, only for the faculty to decide promptly to turn off those Ethernet jacks. It is one of the great puzzles of the Digital Natives topic: once we get access to the Internet and related technologies into the room, what then should we have students do with those technologies?

In my own teaching, I think I under-leverage the technologies in the room. Students are, almost 100%, online on a laptop in the classes that I’m teaching here.  I certainly haven’t figured it out. I’m not sure if anyone I know, with the exception of Jonathan Zittrain, has figured that out yet.  I don’t accept that young people are just wasting time online, but I also don’t think that teachers are doing anywhere near enough to help them to use that online time wisely, during class time or otherwise.

This morning, at our 10th Anniversary celebration, we are talking about the future of politics and the Net. The notes I’ve prepared with my colleagues in advance of the session are here, on the conference wiki; have at them!) Before we start the real-space conversation, a quick pause to introduce a new project, called Publius.  (This post is more or less a cross-posting of my Preface to the Publius project.)

* * *

We live in extraordinary times. For one billion of the six billion people on the planet, our lives are mediated by digital technologies. The way we use these technologies has a huge impact on many aspects of life in wired cultures around the world: how we do business, how we connect with one another, how we relate to institutions, how we participate in civic life, and so forth. Even in places where the Net barely reaches – places like Burma, North Korea, and Cuba – its influence is beginning to be felt. While individuals and groups have more autonomy and power in the networked age, so too do states and international bodies have new and different capacities to govern.

We use digital technologies in ways that are both constructive and disruptive. These technologies make it possible, for instance, for any citizen to speak her mind in a networked public sphere and to be heard by other people just about anywhere else in the world. While this freedom represents a revolution for human rights and democracy, it also makes the harm that her speech can cause much greater. Her speech might be defamatory; or it might be obscene, perhaps unfit for children to hear; or it might be disrespectful to the sovereign of a state far away from where she published it. That sovereign might want to keep anyone in his state from hearing her.

National and international disputes arise from everyday interactions online, like publishing text and video. Within states, people argue about how much to regulate interactions that are mediated by the Internet, like discussions in chat rooms, commercial transactions, and gambling. States are beginning to attack one another in the newly militarized zone of cyberspace. States fight over control of intellectual property that flows across national boundaries. Leaders get very exercised about the way that web site naming conventions and other technical protocols work and about the power of the institutions that manage them.

While the interactions between states and international bodies are paramount, their power knows limits online; their influence must occur alongside that of the companies, markets, and users that comprise the Net. The code and services offered by companies and the coordination provided by markets, have an enormous impact on how online life is governed—they create rules about what we can and cannot do. Those of us who spend a lot of time on the Net – netizens – ourselves are establishing norms that further govern our collective experience online. Groups form and disband quickly. Those that stick around can amass great capacity to include, empower, and exclude. The ability to govern activities online is not the exclusive province of the state, and the line between public and private action is getting blurrier, not clearer, as more of life moves into the networked public sphere.

The Net is in the midst of a constitutional moment that’s unusual, if not unique in world history. Our argument is that we are together participating in a series of constitutional moments, taking place all the time, all around the world. And unlike previous constitutional moments, such as the late eighteenth century in the United States, many more people have a means of shaping the outcome.

The Publius Project — launched as part of Berkman@10 — intends to draw out and record for posterity the diverse voices of those participating in these rolling constitutional moments. We are publishing the arguments of those who are exploring these many processes of decision-making and governance online. Our goal is to illuminate our collective experience and to provide a forum for strong points of view to emerge. We want to shine light on the nuances at the margins of decision-making online. We mean to encourage the Internet community to provoke one another, to inform ourselves, and to listen to others with different experiences. In the process, it’s our goal to help empower individuals, groups, companies, states, and international bodies to work together for the common good, especially as these constitutional moments come in wave after wave, breaking all around us.

* * *

As a starting point, one might begin with David Weinberger’s argument in favor of Tacit Governance. Then swing over to some responses, from Esther Dyson, David Johnson, and Kevin Werbach.

The Harvard Law School just announced the promotion of Phil Malone (in cyberlaw and intellectual property) and Wendy Jacobs (in environmental law) to the full-time faculty as clinical professors. Phil Malone has been the director of the Berkman Center clinical program for the past few years, first with Jeff Cunard and Bruce Keller as co-directors and recently as the sole director. He’s an extraordinary lawyer and teacher. It is our great good fortune at the Berkman Center that Phil has accepted HLS’s offer to join the faculty as a Clinical Professor of Law. Hooray!

We’re planning our session on Digital Natives for the Berkman@10 conference later this week.  The idea is to hold a “myth-busting” session.  A first pass of myths are up on the conference wiki.  The idea is to discuss some of the common misconceptions about kids and technology that we explore in our forthcoming book, Born Digital.  Please suggest others, and looking forward to seeing many great friends later this week.  (Many thanks to Miriam Simun for her leadership on this and other matters.)

It’s been noted that Duke Law School has a long history of leadership in this area, beginning with an online repository for its faculty’s scholarship (dating from 2005) and its journals made accessible online (starting back in 1997!), both of which well predate HLS’s vote on an opt-out Open Access policy last week. Prof. Richard Danner, the school’s law librarian, has a fine article on the open access topic. (Thanks to Paul Lomio at Stanford for the note.) Prof. Jessica Litman, of Michigan, also has an article on this topic, which I found extremely useful when preparing to discuss Open Access with the HLS faculty.

I’m just delighted that the Harvard Law School faculty has voted unanimously to adopt an open access policy. This policy is consistent with the policy adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences earlier this year.

Here is what we approved:

“The Faculty of the Harvard Law School is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy to a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office no later than the date of its publication. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.”

There have been many champions of this and related issues throughout the academic world, including Peter Suber and Michael Carroll. At Harvard, the university librarian, Robert Darnton, and Berkman Center faculty director Stuart Shieber, of the new school of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard, are chief among them.

Prof. Robert Darnton said of this vote: “That such a renowned law school should support Open Access so resoundingly is a victory for the democratization of knowledge. Far from turning its back to the outside world, the HLS is sharing its intellectual wealth.”  Amen.

This summer, I’ll be moving to a new job at HLS, as vice dean for library and information resources.  I’m very excited about this new challenge.  I will still remain involved in the Berkman Center, as one of the faculty directors and in some research projects, but I’ll no longer be the executive director as of July 1, 2008.  We’ve opened up a search for a new executive director for the Berkman Center.  The job is posted here.  I hope you’ll encourage interested people to apply, and to talk to us about it at our upcoming 10th anniversary celebration next week.

StopBadware and the rest of the Net community trying to keep the environment clean of bad code scored a good win this week in the public interest.  The StopBadware team and others were all over a software update from Apple that operated as badware, offering new software installations disguised as product updates.  StopBadware blogged about our review process, saying we were looking into it; prepared a report declaring them as badware; sent the draft report to Apple for review (as we do for all targets before public release); and lo-and-behold, Apple fixed the problem and issued an updated version.  Well done to Max Weinstein and the whole SBW team and others out there keeping companies honest.  If only it ordinarily worked this way…

Learning, Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media is the fourth book I’ve read in the MacArthur/MIT Press Series on Digital Media and Learning. This volume, edited by Anna Everett, is the furthest from my own field — law — and, for me, the most challenging.

Prof. Everett’s opening essay, (which follows the excellent foreword by the series authors, as with each volume in the series), is an effective overview of what follows in the volume. She takes up the familiar debate about the term “digital divide” and why it now rankles more than it helps. She also reminds us that the old joke about how online nobody knows you’re a dog is no longer true, with the advent of rich media and other “advances” in digital technology and how it’s used. I was left, from her chapter, with one line resonating in particular: “the color of the dog counts.” (p. 5)

The rest of the volume consists of three clusters. Future Visions and Excavated Pasts is the first. Dara Byrne leads off with a piece on the future of race. She pulls in and incorporates a series of great quotes from message boards and other online public spaces; takes up (and takes on) John Rawls on the public/private question that runs through so many of our discussions of online life, (p. 22); and digs deep on the future of whether there will be dedicated sites for different races as we look ahead. The punchline is that yes, “minority youth must have access to dedicated online spaces, not just mainstream or ‘race neutral’ ones.” (p. 33)

Tyrone Taborn’s “Separating Race from Technology” is the other essay in this first cluster. Tayborn compares the likelihood of any group of students (”majority white or minority, rich or poor”) knowing Kobe Bryant and Dr. Mark Dean, the African-American engineer involved in IBM’s development of the first PC. His point is clear. As one of a series of possible solutions to the problem of too few minority youth having mentors and heroes in the technology world, Tayborn calls for Digital Media Cultural Mentoring (p. 56).

The second cluster of essays take up art and culture in the digital domain. Raiford Guins guides the reader through a tour of the ways that hip-hop culture, art, and use of technology come together online in the form of “black cultural production in the form of hip-hop 2.0.” (p. 78) It’s a must-read essay; heplful to read with a browser open and a fast broadband connection on tap. Guins has an intriguing segment on the future of the music label, among other take-aways (p. 69 - 70).

Guins’ essay is well-paired with Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre’s celebration and contextualization of Judy Baca’s work at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in LA. (One wonders why LA gets more than its fair share of intriguing digital media production experiments and narratives?) Among other things, Sandoval and Latorre challenge the notion of “digital youth” and the challenges of overly delimiting based just on age — a helpful reminder of a point too easily forgotten. (p. 85) In the final essay of the cluster, Antonio Lopez offers insights into (and concerns about) digital media literacy with respect to Native American populations, told largely in the first person.

Jessie Daniels opens the third cluster with a jarring piece on hate, racism, and white supremacy online. Daniels picks up on themes about the fallacy of colorblindness established in Anna Everett’s introduction. With a link to Henry Jenkins‘ work, Daniels argues for a “multiple literacies” approach to shaping our shared cultural future online and offline. (p. 148 - 50)

Yet more jarring, to me anyway, is Douglas Thomas’s piece on online gaming cultures, called “KPK, Inc.: Race, Nation, and Emergent Culture in Onling Games.” Thomas draws us into gaming environments only to reveal a culture of wild adventure, first-person shooter games, acquisition, treasure, money, and hate all rolled together. The crux of his argument centers on the “Korean problem,” (p. 163-4), a blend of bigotry, nationalism, and competitiveness. The racists that Thomas exposes “are usually Americans / Canadians and white” — and gamers. (p. 164) Along the way, Thomas distinguishes his approach from that of our Berkman colleague Beth Kolko. (p. 155-6)

The final essay, by Mohan Dutta, Graham Bodie, and Ambar Basus takes us in a new direction, further afield, toward the intersection of race, youth, Internet, health, and information. The authors synthesize a great deal of disparate information in unexpected ways. The essay left with an expanded frame of vision, and a frame that I never would have come up with on my own. Their punchline: “disparities in technology uses and health information seeking reflect broader structural disparaties in society that adversely affect communities of color.” (p. 192)

On balance, this collection of essays hangs together very well. Each essay takes a on strong point of view. Overall, the collection both informed my thinking and provoked more by raising hard issues about the impact of growing up online for race, ethnicity, identity, and health.

Our good friends at Public Radio Exchange, led by their executive director and Berkman fellow Jake Shapiro, have been awarded a huge honor from the MacArthur Foundation. PRX is one of a handful of 2008 “Creative and Effective Institutions.” I can think of no more deserving institution than PRX. Bravo!