Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
June 9, 2010 // Upcoming events and digital media

[1] [TUESDAY 6/15] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: Internet Games, Social Inequality, and Racist Talk as Griefing" with Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/06/nakamura)

[2] [THURSDAY 6/17] Law.gov: Massachusetts (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgovMA)

[3] [FRIDAY 6/18] Law.gov: Putting It All Together (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgov)

[REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN 6/28-30] You are invited to the COMMUNIA 2010 Conference on "University and Cyberspace", taking place in Torino, Italy. Visit http://www.communia2010.org/ to learn more and sign up for the announcement list.


[TUESDAY] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on INTERNET GAMES, SOCIAL INEQUALITY, and RACIST TALK AS GRIEFING
==================================================================================
6/15/10, 12:30 PM ET, Berkman Center Conference Room @ 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live

Topic: Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: Internet Games, Social Inequality, and Racist Talk as Griefing
Guest: Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

Games are a radically transnational medium: as Martin Lister writes in New Media: An Introduction, “even before Pokémon, the videogame was perhaps the most thoroughly transnational form of popular culture, both as an industry (with Sony, Sega ad Nintendo as the key players) but also at the level of content—the characters and narratives of many videogames are evidence of relays of influence between America and Japan.” Internet gameplay is becoming more socially and culturally diverse and ubiquitous than ever before. Yet at the same time, the culture of griefing or pranking that dominates these games and other forms of networked social life such as Second Life and Chatroulette takes increasingly racist and racialized forms. The Patriotic Niggas, a group of griefers who delight in "breaking" Second Life and Habbo Hotel by filling public space with garbage, are assuredly not African American, but resort to offensive racist languages as the shortest route to their goal: the disruption of online community and social life. This essay will recap the history of racist griefing online and link the current crisis in racial discourse in the US with this practice, exploring the implications for digital games as a public sphere.

About Lisa:

Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program, and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.

She is the author of "Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet" (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), "Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet" (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of "Race in Cyberspace" (Routledge, 2000).

She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, PMLA, Cinema Journal, The Womens Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled "Digital Race: An Anthology" (Routledge, forthcoming), and she is working on a new monograph on social inequality in virtual worlds, tentatively entitled "Workers Without Bodies: Towards a Theory of Race and Digital Labor in Virtual Worlds, or, Why World of Warcraft needs a Civil Rights Movement."

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/06/nakamura


[THURSDAY] LAW.GOV MASSACHUSETTS
==================================================================================
6/17/10, 10:00-3:00PM, Pound Hall, Harvard Law School
Free and open to the public; registration is required for those attending: http://tinyurl.com/2v7d4dq
Organized and co-hosted by the Harvard Law School Library

Do we have access to all primary legal materials in Massachusetts? What are the best practices for making information accessible? What obstacles face institutions trying to make it available? Our hope is to create a document outlining the most salient issues in accessibility to Massachusetts legal information with suggestions of things that could be done to effect the most accessible system possible in Massachusetts.

Registration is required; visit http://tinyurl.com/2v7d4dq to sign up. Please note that video will be captured for the workshop and posted on the Internet. This is the first day of a two-day workshop focused on Law.gov. To register for Law.gov: Putting It All Together, taking place on Friday 6/18, please visit this page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgov. You are welcome to attend one or both days of the event.

The workshop will feature Carl Malamud, Berkman Faculty Co-Director John Palfrey, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, the Honorable Dina E. Fein, Boston College Librarian Joan Shear, Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic Director Phil Malone, and many more.

http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgovMA


[FRIDAY] LAW.GOV: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
==================================================================================
6/18/10, 10:00-3:00PM, Pound Hall, Harvard Law School
Free and open to the public; registration is required for those attending: http://tinyurl.com/28v3h4v
Organized and co-hosted by the Harvard Law School Library

The Harvard Law School Law.Gov workshop on June 18 is the last in a 6-month series of such workshops that have taken place throughout the country. In this final workshop, participants will discuss the implications of some core principles about access to primary legal materials. Are these principles workable? What will it take to make them real? What are the implications of these principles? Our hope is that upon completion of this workshop, a crisp set of basic principles can be presented and discussed, perhaps leading to the enactment of some of these principles into policy through mechanisms such as judicial rules, executive orders, or legislation.

Registration is required; visit http://tinyurl.com/28v3h4v to sign up. Please note that video will be captured for the workshop and posted on the Internet. This is the second day of a two-day workshop focused on Law.gov. To register for Law.gov: Massachusetts, taking place on Thursday 6/17, please visit this page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgovMA. You are welcome to attend one or both days of the event.

The workshop will feature Carl Malamud, Berkman Faculty Co-Director John Palfrey, Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic Director Phil Malone, and many more.

http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgov


[REGISTER NOW] COMMUNIA 2010 CONFERENCE: UNIVERSITY AND CYBERSPACE
==================================================================================
6/28-30/10, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy
Free and open to the public; register via the conference website: http://www.communia2010.org/

Universities are entrusted with the increasingly important responsibility of creating, sharing, and fostering use of knowledge on behalf of society, and to that end, are the recipients of tremendous investments of time, money, space, authority and freedom. Universities have embraced this role in diverse fashions, varying by tradition, period, and discipline, but we now ask them to go further. As we progress ever more deeply into a networked age, our knowledge institutions are faced with concomitant opportunities. They are challenged by society to become a driving force to create and disseminate knowledge - using innovative, effective, and dynamic approaches - derived from and for the networked world.

The COMMUNIA 2010 International Conference will provide a venue for exploring these points, with the twofold objective of defining a shared vision of the future of universities as knowledge institutions and of identifying the main steps leading from vision to reality.

To learn more and sign up for the announcements list, please visit http://www.communia2010.org/.


OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
=========================

[1] 6/11: Online Censorship – Implications of Content Filtering At Home and Abroad featuring Berkman Faculty Co-Director John Palfrey // Washington, DC (http://www.mediaaccess.org/2010/04/mapping-change-series/)

[2] 6/15-6/18: Computers, Freedom, and Privacy // San Jose (http://www.cfp2010.org/wiki/index.php/Program)

[3] 6/17: Communication of Technical Knowledge Workshop // Boston University (https://sites.google.com/site/commtechbu/home)


DIGITAL MEDIA: Watch and Listen
================================
Did you miss this week's luncheon talk? Catch up with Berkman videos, podcasts, pictures, and dig in to our archive at http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive.

-The FCC's Authority Over Broadband Access: The History and Context of the Debate (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2010/05/FCCPanel1 / http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddpfq_Bq-W8)

-The FCC's Authority Over Broadband Access: The Third Way - What Happens Next? (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2010/05/FCCPanel2 / http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sodqt_A6un4&feature=channel)

-Radio Berkman 153: The Wonderful World of Spectrum (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/podcasts/radioberkman153)


SIGN UP TO RECEIVE EMAIL NEWSLETTERS
=======================================
Sign up for Berkman's weekly events email newsletter and more: http://cyber.harvard.edu/getinvolved#mailinglists


GET INVOLVED: connect with social tools and more
=============================================
Jobs, internships, and more: http://cyber.harvard.edu/getinvolved/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/berkmancenter
Twitter: http://twitter.com/berkmancenter/
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/berkmancenter
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/berkmancenter/
Berkman Homepage RSS Feed: http://cyber.harvard.edu/news/feed/
Events Blog: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/berkmanevents/
Events Feedback Form: http://bit.ly/berkeventsfeedback


BERKMAN CALENDAR & UPCOMING EVENTS PREVIEW
==================================================
See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, conferences, and more: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events. All of our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.


ABOUT US
========
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.harvard.edu.