Berkman Center for Internet and Society: Video Fishbowl

Laura Amico on Jazz and Journalism: Reporting with Improvisation

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 20:44:46 +0000

Improvisation theories, drawn mostly from jazz, have increasingly been applied to entrepreneurship, new product development, and other fields, but rarely, if ever, to journalism. Yet journalism is an industry built on improvisation, from the actions of reporters out in the field, to the deadline work of editors and page designers. More than that, it is [...]

Dorothea Kleine on ICTs, Development and the Capabilities Approach

Tue, 28 May 2013 21:00:55 +0000

ICT for development (ICT4D) scholars claim that the internet, radio, and mobile phones can support development. Yet the dominant paradigm of development as economic growth is too limiting to understand the full potential of these technologies. Dorothea Kleine translates Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to development –- focusing on a pluralistic understanding of people’s values and [...]

Timothy H. Edgar on Addressing Cyber Conflict While Protecting Privacy and Internet Freedom

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:00:33 +0000

What does talk of cyber war mean for our liberties? The United States has a new military command for cyberspace, with the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) as its commander. At the same time, the Secretary of State has announced that the “freedom to connect” is an aspect of fundamental human rights and [...]

Justin Reich on Personalized Learning, Backpacks Full of Cash, Rockstar Teachers, and MOOC Madness

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:10:23 +0000

For decades, policymakers and futurists have heralded digital tools as essential to the the future of learning. Has the moment of disruptive transformational revolution finally arrived? If we are at a watershed moment, what futures are available to us? Justin Reich — visiting lecturer at MIT, Berkman fellow, and educational researcher — discusses the intersection [...]

Jonathan Zittrain on Reconciling a Global Internet and Local Law

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:56:54 +0000

Location matters. Energy, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, natural hazards, traffic and transportation, crime and political instability, water quality and availability, climate change, migration and urbanization –- all key issues of the 21st century –- have a location component. Jonathan Zittrain — co-founder and director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society — examines how a [...]

Daniel J. Caron & Eric Mechoulan on How to Archive for the Future

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:00:56 +0000

In order to secure our future, we need to know how to organize our past. If we want to preserve accessibility to valuable information about legal, political, social, and cultural discourses in an era of information abundance, it becomes vital to design carefully how we distinguish between noise and significant pieces of information. In this [...]

Work Here: Heather Whitney on Having a Voice in the Modern Workplace and Changing the World

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:55:29 +0000

Companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook are thought to provide some of the most envied work environments on the planet. But should employees be worried that their trust in their employer, so purposefully cultivated, has been built on promises that are more illusion than enforceable promise? Some in the labor movement think these employers [...]

Derek Khanna on Disruptive Innovation in Washington, DC

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:09:56 +0000

SOPA, CISPA, CFAA, DMCA, mobile phone unlocking — how can a complacent Congress address real and systemic problems related to technology and antiquated legislation? In this talk, Derek Khanna — Yale Law Fellow with the Information Society Project and former House Republican Study Committee staffer (where he authored the widely read House Republican Study Committee [...]

Bruce Schneier & Jonathan Zittrain on IT, Security, and Power

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:05:35 +0000

How does the Internet affect power? How does power affect the Internet? Factors such as ubiquitous surveillance, the rise of cyberwar, ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, and a feudal model of security collide to create a circumstance in which those in power are using information technology to increase [...]

Anil Dash on The Web We Lost

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:53:55 +0000

In the past decade, we’ve seen an unprecedented rise of powerful social networks, connecting millions or even billions of people who can now communicate almost instantaneously. But many of the promises that were made by the creators of the earliest social networking technologies have gone unfulfilled. In this talk, Anil Dash—entrepreneur, technologist, and writer—takes a [...]

Dan Gillmor on Permission Taken

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:49:15 +0000

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, [...]

Geoffrey Miller on the Smartphone Revolution in the Behavioral Sciences

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:59:29 +0000

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 [...]

Book Talk: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Neil Cukier on Big Data – and its Dark Side

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 21:30:18 +0000

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 [...]

Eric Gordon on Transforming Local Civic Engagement Through an Online Game

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 19:39:43 +0000

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 [...]