Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group
at Yale Law School
Wednesday, December 7, 6:30PM
Yale Law School, 40 Ashmun St, New Haven (Map)
RSVP to Colin Agur at ca2393@columbia.edu
The "Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group" is a forum for fellows and affiliates of the MIT, Yale Law School Information Society Project, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University to discuss their ongoing research.
This month's presentations will include:
Murray Turoff and the Evolution of Computer Mediated Communication
Today’s social-media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, YouTube and applications such as wikis, mobile chat, blogs have made it easier than ever for anybody to communicate with friends and business associates. Social media have even become the digital tool of choice to activists, dissenters, revolutionaries and even terrorists. All of these technologies are based on one simple foundation: computer-mediated communication (CMC). In this paper I explore the birth and evolution of CMC by profiling the “father” of CMC, Murray Turoff [1]. The technology he invented in the early 1970s forms the basis of much of social media today.
Ramesh Subramanian is the Gabriel Ferrucci Professor of Computer Information Systems at the School of Business, Quinnipiac University, and Visiting Fellow at the Yale Law School’s “Information Society Project.” He is especially interested in the intersection of security, privacy and politics, and has published several peer-reviewed articles and papers in these areas. Published books include “Access to Knowledge in India: New Research on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development,” (Dec 2011), Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, London, UK; “The Global Flow of Information: Legal, Social and Cultural Perspectives,” (August 2011), New York University Press, NY; “Computer Security, Privacy and Politics: Current Issues, Challenges and Solutions,” (March 2008), IGI-Global Publishing, Hershey, PA, U.S.A.; and “Peer-to-Peer Computing: The Evolution of a Disruptive Technology,” (2005), Idea Group Publishing: Hershey, PA, U.S.A. In 2008-2009, Dr. Subramanian was awarded a Fulbright Senior Researcher grant to study the effects and consequences of Internet spread in rural India.
[1] Murray Turoff coined the name “Computer Conferencing” in 1971, to refer to an automated “Policy Delphi” which he built and operated in 1970. In a later (1989) article, Turoff wrote that his system would be more appropriately described as a Computer Mediated Communication system (CMC). While it is uncertain as to who actually coined the term CMC first, I am quite certain that it was Turoff who implemented the first operational system that falls in the category of CMC.