Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

The always-on, simultaneous society in which we have found ourselves has altered our relationship to culture, media, news, politics, economics, and power. We are living in a digital temporal landscape, but instead of exploiting its asynchronous biases, we are misguidedly attempting to extend the time-is-money agenda of the Industrial Age into the current era. The [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg As high school and college students transition into a knowledge economy they face both advantages and challenges with how they find information and engage with co-workers as teammates. As a recent study of US employers and recent college graduates discovered, some young hires are pretty good at finding [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]