RSM welcomes Ethan Zuckerman for a conversation with Faculty Director James Mickens on the future of social media research and third-party social media tools. Prof. Zuckerman and Prof. Mickens both serve on the board of the Coalition for Independent Tech Research, which works to advance, defend, and sustain the right to study the impact of technology on society, and they have written about the ways platform API changes will impact moderation and research. Prof. Zuckerman’s projects at UMass-Amherst’s Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure include RedditMap.social and Gobo, and he has written extensively about the privacy implications of third-party social media tools.
Ethan Zuckerman is an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the founder of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure, a research group that is studying and building alternatives to the existing commercial internet, and the author of two books: Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. He is the co-founder of global blogging community Global Voices, and works with social change nonprofit organizations around the world. Zuckerman is an alumnus of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Geekcorps, and Tripod.
James Mickens is an associate professor of computer science at Harvard University and Faculty Director at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media. His research focuses on the performance, security, and robustness of large-scale distributed web services. Mickens received a B.S. degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan. Before coming to Harvard, he spent six years as a researcher at Microsoft, and a semester as a visiting professor at MIT.