Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

Netflix for Voting

Tuesday, May 24, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

TurboVote is a service that makes voting by mail and voter registration as simple as renting a DVD with Netflix. Come hear how TurboVote built in two months for spare change what the government couldn't do for any price. The founders (one a former Berktern!) and developer will discuss the project's legal, technical and philosophical issues and how TurboVote will bring democracy into the 21st century. Seth Flaxman is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Democracy Works, the nonprofit behind TurboVote. Paul Schreiber spent a decade as a software engineer, including eight years on Apple’s Mac OS X team. In 2008, he volunteered for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. In addition to knocking on doors and making phone calls, Schreiber co-developed Vote For Change, registering over 500,000 voters and helping a million people find their voting location RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Communicating Trustworthiness - Drivers of Online Trust

Tuesday, May 31, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

User trust has been identified as a key success factor of online business: A user's willingness to provide personal data is a prerequisite for online transactions. Research has shown that this willingness is based on the perceived trustworthiness of the transaction partner. While antecedents of online trust have been studied extensively from a marketing and information systems perspective very little is known about the role of corporate communication in online trust management. Our studies in this field based on qualitative and quantitative analysis (indepth interviews and standardized sampling) examine trust in online businesses distinguished by industries and business models. We identify 9 core drivers of online trust from a corporate communication's as well as the user's perspective and differentiate the contribution of the corporate communication function to these drivers. Communicating trustworthiness is more than luck of the draw. It is based on an approach of strategic communication based on premises that will become increasingly important in digital life. Miriam Meckel, PhD., holds a professorship for Corporate Communication at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and is the Managing Director of the Institute for Media and Communication Management (since 2005). She is also an adviser for Public Affairs and Business Communication. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Hyper-Public: A Symposium on Designing Privacy and Public Space

June 9-10, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Technology is transforming privacy and reshaping what it means to be in public. Our interactions—personal, professional, financial, etc.—increasingly take place online, where they are archived, searchable, and easily replicated. Discussions of privacy often focus solely on the question of how to protect privacy. But a thriving public sphere, whether physical or virtual, is also essential to society. Hyper-Public: A Symposium on Designing Privacy and Public Space, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, will bring together computer scientists, ethnographers, architects, historians, artists and legal scholars to discuss how design influences privacy and public space, how it shapes and is shaped by human behavior and experience, and how it can cultivate norms such as tolerance and diversity. Confirmed participants include Assaf Biderman (MIT SENSEable City Laboratory), danah boyd (Microsoft Research), Herbert Burkert (University of St. Gallen), Gerhard Buurman (Zurich University of the Arts), Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University) Judith Donath (Berkman Center), Paul Dourish (UC Irvine), Urs Gasser (Berkman Center) Adam Greenfield (Urbanscale LLC), Jef Huang (Berkman Center), Betsy Masiello (Google), Nicholas Negroponte (MIT), Charles Nesson (Berkman Center), John Palfrey (Berkman Center), Julia Scher (Academy of Media Arts Cologne), Laurent Stalder (ETHZ), David Weinberger (Berkman Center/Harvard Libra ry Innovation Lab), (Berkman Center), Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center), and many more. Registration is open. more information on our website>

Juan Carlos de Martin & Charles Nesson on Re-thinking the University's Role in Society in the Network Age

Universities are at a historical crossroads, for both structural, long-term processes, as well as for more recent developments, mostly due to political decisions and technology. In this talk Juan Carlos de Martin — coordinator of COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the digital public domain — and Charles Nesson — Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society — attempt to answer the question: How can we best develop the potential of an Internet-enabled University without losing sight of the University's ultimate goals in society? Download the audio>

Erez Lieberman Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michel on Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books

Construct a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed, and then analyze that corpus using advanced software and the investigatory curiosity of thousands, and you get something called "Culturomics," a field in which cultural trends are represented quantitatively. In this talk Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel — co-founders of the Cultural Observatory at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google — show how culturomics can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. more information on our website>

danah boyd on Embracing a Culture of Connectivity

Many young adults have incorporated social media into their daily practices, both academically and personally. They use these tools to connect, collaborate, communicate and create. In this talk, danah boyd — Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and affiliate of the Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society — examines the different social media practices common among young adults, clarifying both the cultural logic behind these everyday practices, and the role of social media in academia. She is introduced by Judy Singer, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University, and John Palfrey, Faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. more information on YouTube>

Academic Uses of Social Media

Social media — from blogs to wikis to tweets — have become academic media, new means by which scholars communicate, collaborate, and teach. This distinguished panel of Harvard faculty discuss how they are adopting and adapting to new communication and networking tools Panelists include: Michael Sandel, Nancy Koehn, N. Gregory Mankiw, Harry R. Lewis, and John Palfrey. more information on YouTube>

Perry Hewitt on Social media resources at Harvard

Perry Hewitt — Director of Digital Communications and Communications Services at Harvard University — discusses social media resources at Harvard and how they've reacted to and helped shape the academic mission. more information on YouTube>