Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

From Wikipedia to Open Source Software, Peer Production –- a large-scale collaborative model of production primarily based on voluntary contributions –- is emerging as an economically significant production model alongside firms, markets and governments. Yet, its impressive success remains difficult to explain through the assumptions of standard economic theory. In this talk, Jerome Hergueux — [...]

Prominent robot ethics questions focus on liability and privacy concerns in the face of increasingly autonomous technology. A lesser-discussed issue is the emergence and effect of robots that are designed to interact with humans on a social level. Studies have begun to establish a tendency to perceive social robots differently than we do other objects. [...]

SOPA and ACTA, two controversial copyright proposals in the United States and European Union that many feared would lead to Internet censorship, came into the mainstream when people used Facebook, Twitter, other social media, blogs, and websites to organize and launch protests. In this talk Edward Lee — Professor of Law and the Director of [...]

Though the stereotype of “nerd” might involve a white male with a laptop, white males lag behind minorities and women in many categories of social media and technology use. But current investments in new technology don’t not match the consumers of these technologies. According to the Kaufmann Foundation, only 4% of venture capital of any [...]

In less than two decades Nollywood (Nigeria’s booming movie industry) has grown to an estimated value of $250 million, employing over a million people and producing over 1000 films each year. Nollywood’s movies have an audience of millions in Nigeria, throughout Africa and around the world — from Bombay to Brooklyn. But the industry faces [...]

What can we learn from the protest wave of the last years? How does social media impact the capacity for collective action? Does social media contribute to blunting movement impacts by facilitating horizontal, non-institutional and “leaderless” movements? How do these movements compare with their predecessors like the civil-rights or anti-colonial movements? In this talk Zeynep [...]

On the ancient Silk Road, treasure-laden caravans made their arduous way through deserts and mountain passes, establishing trade between Asia and the civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean. Today’s electronic Silk Roads ferry information across continents, enabling individuals and corporations anywhere to provide or receive services without obtaining a visa. But the legal infrastructure for [...]

Worldwide, children’s digital access and literacy is growing apace. Yet many of the creative, informative, interactive and participatory features of the digital environment remain substantially underused, and this is a particular challenge in lower-income countries and among socially excluded children. In this talk, Sonia Livingstone — professor in the Department of Media and Communications at [...]

Two hundred years ago, artists had the monopoly on image making. Now, every parade or disaster is accompanied by ten thousand twitpics. In a world where mobile technology has made images instantaneous and ubiquitous, what does visual art have left to say? Drawing on her experiences doing illustrated journalism around Guantanamo Bay and the Greek [...]

Curarium is a collection of collections, an “animated archive,” designed to serve as a model for crowdsourcing annotation, curation, and augmentation of works within and beyond their respective collections. Curarium aims to construct sharable, media-rich stories and elaborate arguments about individual items as well as groups of items within a corpora. The metaLab’s Jeffrey Schnapp, [...]

Ever come across a product that looked beautiful but was awful to use? Or stumbled over a something that was ugly as hell but just did exactly what you wanted? Ever wondered how these factors work together, and how they influence the experiences we create? Product usability and aesthetics are coexistent, but they are not [...]

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg In January of 2012 a British mathematician posted a humble invitation on his blog for fellow academics and researchers to join him in boycotting the prestigious research publisher Elsevier. Citing high prices, exploitative bundling practices, and lobbying efforts to prevent open access to research, the mathematician publicly denounced [...]

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg Revelations of the NSA’s data surveillance efforts have raised serious questions about the ethics and necessity of violating privacy that have been bubbling under the surface for some time. Efforts to monitor communication are nothing new, but electronically mediated communication has increased the amount of information being shared, [...]

Legal practice and legal education both face disruptive change due to technology. Oliver R. Goodenough — Berkman Fellow, Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School, and Adjunct Professor at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College — discusses how technology is shaping legal practice, and how learning from this phenomenon should be a priority [...]

We live in an age of connection, one that is accelerated by the Internet. This increasingly ubiquitous, immensely powerful technology often leads us to assume that as the number of people online grows, it inevitably leads to a smaller, more cosmopolitan world. We’ll understand more, we think. We’ll know more. We’ll engage more and share [...]