Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group

February 16th, 6:00 PM ET, MIT Media Lab, Room E14-525

The "Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group" is a forum for fellows and affiliates of the Comparative Media Studies Program at 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 presenters will include: Leah Buechley of the MIT Media Lab on "LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardware?s Long Tail is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities"; Brad Abruzzi of the Berkman Center on "Copyright and the Vagueness Doctrine"; and Dave Karpf of Rutgers University on "Don't Think of an Online Elephant: Explaining the Dearth of Political Infrastructure Online in America". For abstracts and more information, visit the event website. more >

Students for Free Culture Conference

February 19-20, New York City, co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society

The Students for Free Culture Conference is a gathering of student activists, intellectuals, artists, hackers, and generally interested people to discuss the latest issues in the free cultural world, especially with a focus on student involvement and participation. The conference will feature keynotes from the creators of Diaspora, Pablo Ortellado, and Susan Crawford, as well as panels on remix culture, open education, and fashion and copyright. more >

The Internet, Young Adults and Political Participation around the 2008 Presidential Elections

Tuesday, February 22, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center, 23 Everett St 2nd Floor

How are online and offline political activities linked? Using data collected soon after the 2008 presidential elections on a diverse group of young adults from Obama's home city of Chicago, this presentation will look at the relationship of online and offline political engagement. Thanks to detailed information about political participation, political capital and Internet uses in addition to people's demographic and socioeconomic background, we are able to consider the relative importance of numerous factors in who was more or less likely to vote and engage in other types of political action. Eszter Hargittai is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project and a Berkman Center Fellow. Aaron Shaw is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley and a Berkman Center Fellow. RSVP Required. more >

The Googlization of Everything

Friday, February 25, 12:00pm, Griswold Hall Room 110, Harvard Law School

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar, and is currently a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. From 1999 through the summer of 2007 he worked in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University. Vaidhyanathan is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and Salon.com, and he maintains a blog, www.googlizationofeverything.com. He is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and to MSNBC.COM and has appeared in a segment of "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart. Vaidhyanathan is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. He will discuss his new book, The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry). RSVP Required. more >

Brian Kernighan on Why (In)numeracy Matters

Technology has buried us in an avalanche of numbers and graphs and charts, many of which claim to present the truth about important issues. At the same time, our personal facility with numbers has diminished, leaving us at the mercy of quantitative reasoning and presentation that is often wrong and sometimes not disinterested. Brian Kernighan — author, Berkman Fellow, and Computer Science Professor at Princeton — discusses the idea of numeracy: how to assess the numbers we are presented with every day, and how to produce sensible numbers of our own. Watch the video or download the audio>

Radio Berkman 174: The Neverending Concert (Rethink Music III)

Musicians are increasingly becoming their own managers, promoters, bookers, and agents. And with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, BandCamp, and dozens of other ways of staying in touch with their audience, the concert never stops. There’s no way to put a dollar value on this engagement, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile. How are artists building an audience, completely outside of their music, simply by opening up online? Nancy Baym — author of the recent book Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Professor of Communications at University of Kansas, and all around music aficionado — joined me this week to talk about how fans are building genuine relationships online and how artists are able to thrive because of them. Download the audio>