Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

The history of the American red light district is quite brief –- from railroad signal lights to hotel bathroom selfies -– and clouded in myth. Soon it may be lost. In this talk, Melissa Gira Grant — freelance journalist and author of “Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work” (Verso, 2014) — reconsiders how […]

Millions of learners on platforms like edX and Coursera are generating terabytes of data tracking their activity in real time. Online learning platforms capture extraordinarily detailed records of student behavior, and now the challenge for researchers is to explore how these new datasets can be used to advance the science of learning. In this edX […]

We now wander in Best Buy, Lowes and on Amazon and buy all sorts of devices from thermostats, hi-fi gear, tablets, phones, and laptops or desktops as well as home routers to build our home networks. Most of these we plug in and forget about. But should we? In this talk Jim Gettys — American […]

In this talk Dino Sossi — Berkman Fellow, multimedia producer, and Doctoral Candidate in Instructional Technology and Media at Columbia University — presents excerpts from his new documentary film “Home.” “Home” focuses on the tension between a younger generation’s need for self-discovery and an older generation’s wish to move on. Shot throughout Europe and North […]

The world is now saturated with media content, and attention is scarce almost everywhere. The fact of saturation and the ease of production does not mean equitable access to attention, even for important and worthwhile content. What we call the caring problem for audiences is not a determined fact, but also of building communities, language […]

Cloud-based ed tech facilitates educational innovation — such as new connected learning frameworks — but also poses privacy challenges as more and more potentially sensitive data about students goes into the cloud. In this talk the Student Privacy Initiative team presents recommendations from their recent report, Framing the Law & Policy Picture: A Snapshot of […]

It is undeniable that social media played a role in recent revolutions across the Arab world. But it is harder to identify the relationships between different actors on and off social media, and the flow of information about the revolutions. In this talk Dalia Othman — Berkman Fellow and Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Center for […]

Online, interface designs fashion people’s appearance, shape their communication and influence their behavior. Can we see another’s face or do we know each other only by name? Do our words disappear forever once they leave the screen or are they permanently archived, amassing a history of our views and reactions? Are we aware of how […]

Can we use technology to help us be more human? To smile more, to touch and to listen to each other? What if a computer could understand and make decisions about our social relationships better than we could ourselves? Would our interactions be improved by computationally determining what to do and say? What happens if […]

India’s identity project is the the world’s largest biometric database — currently consisting of almost 600 million enrolled. By locating this techno-utopian vision within the larger surveillance state that a unique identifier facilitates, Malavika Jayaram — lawyer, Berkman Fellow, and Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore — describes the ‘welfare industrial complex’ […]

More than a sixth of Indians have access to the Internet, leaving a billion people behind. But smartphones are getting cheaper and mobile internet connections are becoming more easily available. The new Internet users will demand content that won’t be in English, that doesn’t necessarily demand high levels of literacy and works well on basic […]

Listen:or download | …also in Ogg Most of the spectrum of frequency that exists in the US is occupied or owned by large wireless corporations, cable companies, by the government. But at least one small chunk of spectrum — “low-band spectrum” wireless, or TV white spaces (so-called because it is the space between the television […]

We are becoming data. Between our mobile phones, browser history, wearable sensors, and connected devices in our homes, there’s more data about us than ever before. So how are we learning to live with all this data? Inspired by her ethnographic interview work with members of the quantified self community, Berkman fellow Sara M. Watson […]

With the democratization of content creation came the democratization of the overzealous copyright claim. Do private agreements between copyright holders and hosting platforms such as YouTube’s Content ID system compromise artist’s fair use rights? In this open discussion Elisa Kreisinger — Brooklyn-based video artist and artist-in-residence at Public Knowledge — invites artists, users, and lawyers […]

Ethereum is a contract validating and enforcing system based on a distributed public ledger such as the one implemented by the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The system allows for the management of complex distributed autonomous organizations, which raises questions about legality. Could this new platform promote the establishment of an entirely decentralized society, or will its disruptive […]