Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, organizations and researchers have developed and distributed a variety of tools to assist Internet users to both monitor and circumvent such censorship. In this talk, Jon Penney—Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab and Berkman Fellow—examines some of the international law and politics of such censorship resistance [...]

On March 5th, 2012, the American nonprofit, Invisible Children, published a video called “Kony 2012″ on the social video-sharing network, Youtube. Within six days the video was dubbed the “most viral video in history,” beating out pop artists Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Beyonce’s music videos in how quickly it hit 100 million views. In [...]

Ghana, a small country on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, is the size of Oregon. Its entire population is only double that of New York City. Yet what is unfolding there matters to the future of the Internet. In this talk, Jenna Burrell — Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UC [...]

In what ways do we reward the authentic learning and work that young people do that is not validated and evaluated by our educational institutions? In this highly connected world that is powered by what we need when we need it, is school really enough? Berkman Fellow and Engagement Game Lab director Eric Gordon leads [...]

Activist Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) actions such as Anonymous’ “Operation Payback” owe their success to the role of tool design and media coverage. Through a close reading of changes in tool interface and functionality over several iterations, Molly Sauter—Berkman Center fellow and graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT—considers the evolution of the [...]

In what ways is the Chinese Internet a better source for grassroots Chinese sentiment than traditional quotes and sources? In what ways is it worse? More broadly, what best practices can and should journalists use when mining social media for sentiment? David Wertime—co-founder and co-editor of Tea Leaf Nation, an English-language online magazine that synthesizes [...]

In the Internet era, a very few companies control our information destiny. In this talk, and in her new book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, Susan Crawford—a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology [...]

Armed with little more than a modest smartphone (mostly even ordinary phones) and an Internet subscription that will permit only a fair access to the mobile GPRS/EDGE, Nigerian young people went into the 2011 elections with a new wave of enthusiasm and interest. In light of the renewed hope and confidence, and the desire to [...]

Citizen video in Southeast Asia has exploded in recent times, and has come to play a significant role in national and regional politics, documenting spectacular events, spearheading campaigns and uncovering scandals. In this discussion, Andrew Lowenthal — Co-Founder and Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific human rights and environmental video project — outlines EngageMedia’s approach [...]

Say the idea is to re-awaken our feelings for plants even at our hyper-networked speed — do we want digital tools to do the re-wiring or are we convinced their auto-brightness and push notifications divert us from the living, breathing nonhuman sensorium? Kyle Parry — a Researcher at metaLAB and a PhD student in Film [...]

Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is a collaborative effort founded by Vint Cerf and a large body of network researchers, dedicated to creating an Internet-scale ecosystem for truly open network measurement. Measurement Lab allows researchers the ability to run open source broadband measurement tools on well-managed, near global infrastructure. WIth this data, made publicly available, M-Lab is [...]

What happens when a movie maker looks to the Web to work around the traditional entertainment system in which he is one of the leading figures? In this panel, Rob Burnett — executive producer of “The Late Show with David Letterman” and creator of the much admired series “Ed” — discusses what he has learned [...]

Marc Abrahams — editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, host of the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, and author of several books (including his latest, This is Improbable: Cheese String Theory, Magnetic Chickens and Other WTF Research) — leads a lively exploration of weird science, off-beat research, and things that go bump in the [...]

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg What if you could witness a crime taking place from space, and even step in to prevent it? A group of researchers at Harvard’s Humanitarian Initiative are trying to do exactly that. As the nation of Sudan faced a complex crisis — a secession of the southern region [...]

Simply put, when it comes to information and access and use in a networked world, laws are imperfectly suited to deal with the diversity and fluidity of human behavior. The mixture of freedom and control that human beings require to flourish is achieved most effectively when regulatory architectures are characterized by operational transparency — by [...]