Berkman Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

Sam Bowles on Kudunomics: Information and Property Rights in the Weightless Economy [Audio]

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:12:15 +0000

Sam Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute explores how the economy of grain and steel is slowly being displaced by the weightless economy of information and network connections. Bowles presents a model and history of the long-term development and transformation of property rights drawing on recent behavioral experiments and econometric estimates of wealth dynamics in [...]

Cameran Ashraf on #iranelection: The digital media response to the 2009 Iranian election [Audio]

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:58:36 +0000

Cameran Ashraf presents how social and digital media play a crucial role in helping mass social movements coordinate and communicate effectively. With Iran as a case study, this presentation explores the role new communication technologies are playing in the post-election unrest, how people outside of Iran are helping through digital media, and the Iranian government’s [...]

Jonathan Zittrain on “Minds for Sale” [Audio]

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:30:47 +0000

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, explores the evolving world of cloud computing. Cloud computing is not just for computing anymore: you can now find as much mindshare as you can afford out in the cloud, too. A new range of projects is making the application of human brainpower as purchasable and [...]

Nathan Eagle on Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems [Audio]

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:26:59 +0000

Nathan Eagle, Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, infers behavioral dynamics on a broad spectrum of scales using technology; from risky behavior in a group of MIT freshman, to cholera outbreaks in Rwanda and wealth in the UK, to disease transmission and slum formations in East Africa. Though the analytical techniques are sophisticated, the [...]

David Weinberger on What Information Was [Audio]

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:13:34 +0000

Berkman Fellow David Weinberger investigates the origin of modern “information”, trying to understand what about it led us to embrace it as the dominant–paradigmatic–way of understanding ourselves and our world. David Weinberger will present an informal sketch of a direction, suggesting that we leaped into information because it reflected a long-held but squirrely metaphysics. Download [...]

Yorick Wilks on Internet Companions: technical and social issues [Audio]

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:57:13 +0000

Yorick Wilks of the Oxford Internet Institute presents COMPANIONS, an EU project that aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual ‘Companion’. This talk describes the functionality of a Senior Companion (SC), a program that elicits the life memories of the elderly, [...]

Ellen Goodman and Jake Shapiro on Redesigning public media for the 21st Century [AUDIO]

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:00:58 +0000

Ellen Goodman of Rutgers University School of Law and Jake Shapiro, Executive Director of the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), discuss public media’s role in providing public discourses, advancing democratic capabilities, and empowering publics to communicate and organize. The two investigate whether the United States has a system of public media that is able to support [...]

Elizabeth Goodman on Walled Gardens: Opening the Discussion [Audio]

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:11:40 +0000

“Walled gardens” is a common term for systems that limit the entrance and exit of certain kinds of data. It is a deceptively simple metaphor that relies on the existence of a shared set of assumptions about what gardens are, what walls are, and what it means to build and maintain them. In this talk, [...]

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger presents “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” [Audio]

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:28:04 +0000

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, [...]

Radio Berkman Recent Classics: What the Heck is a Commons?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:00:12 +0000

It’s been a busy week at the Berkman Center, so we had to forgo a new podcast this week. But have no fear, we did not forget you! We dusted off a recent classic from our archive by popular demand: “Episode 124, What the Heck is a Commons?” David Bollier, author of Viral Spiral: How the [...]

Jesse Shapins and James Burns on Mapping Main Street [Audio]

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:51:22 +0000

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, [...]

Radio Berkman 134: Small Medium at Large

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:00:58 +0000

Few dispute that the web will be the dominant medium of the 21st Century – swallowing whole newspapers, books, radio, television, and the cinema. And even as the web grows virtually – over a trillion unique urls and growing – it shrinks physically – from laptop, to netbook, from cell phone, to even tinier and [...]

John Clippinger and Oliver Goodenough on Cloud Law, Finance 3.0, and Digital Institutions [AUDIO]

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:51:26 +0000

John Clippinger and Oliver Goodenough of the Berkman Center’s Law Lab discuss the progress made this year by the Law Lab – especially three specific projects that develop new digital institutions and research tools to foster innovation and deepen our understanding of trust, transparency and human cooperation. Liveblogging from the talk by David Weinberger Download the [...]

Herkko Hietanen on Network Recorders and Social Enrichment of Television [AUDIO]

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:31:18 +0000

Television recorders are going online. Device manufacturers are starting to produce consumer devices and software that can be connected to Internet at consumers’ homes. New models of innovation are starting to emerge. This talk proposes the social enrichment of TV offerings may prove to create disruptive innovation to an industry accustomed to control the consumption [...]

Radio Berkman 132: Learning to Share

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:53:41 +0000

Ownership structures for creative works – such as Copyright, Creative Commons, Fair Use, Public Domain – abound. This week, Kenneth Crews, the director of the Copyright Office at Columbia University, speaks with us about some of the distinctions, and the ways to make sure your work is protected as much or as little as possible. Listen: or [...]