Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

Bots, Mobs, Geeks: The new separation of powers / Top Secret, XXX, Private, All Rights Reserved

Tuesday, June 21, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

1) Bots, Mobs, Geeks: The new separation of powers Are we be ruled by robots? The mob? Technocrats? Yes, yes, and yes. The question is not if, but how -- and how we should prevent any one of the three from taking over. 2) Top Secret, XXX, Private, All Rights Reserved Confidentiality, content regulation, privacy, and copyright are all asking the same question: Who should have access to what kind of expression, and when? Why, then, do we continue talk about them as separate subjects? And what would happen if we approached them as part of a single, unified set of rules? Should organizations like Creative Commons move into offering "privacy licenses"? What can the music industry teach governments about Wikileaks? What can the CIA learn from YouTube? Glenn Otis Brown is Director of Business Development for Twitter in New York. Before that, he was Head of Music Partnerships at YouTube. Glenn has worked as a products counsel at Google, where he worked on YouTube, Google Image Search, Blogger, Google Talk, the Google WiFi initiative, and Google Sitemaps, among many other projects. He was Executive Director of Creative Commons from summer 2002 through spring 2005 and currently serves on the Creative Commons Board of Directors. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Kate Hennessy on Ethnographies of Access, Ownership, and Collaboration in the Virtual Museum

Museums and academic institutions are rapidly digitizing their ethnographic collections to make them accessible to the public and to communities from which they originated. These practices amplify the public nature of institutional collections, create opportunities for re-thinking how collections should be shared online, and help merge global heritage policies and institutional practices with Aboriginal paradigms of knowledge circulation, ethics, and control. In this talk about collaboratively designed virtual museum projects with Dane-zaa and Inuvialuit communities in Canada, Kate Hennessy — Director of the Making Culture Lab at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology — shows how access to digital collections can both facilitate the reclaiming of intellectual property rights and copyright of cultural heritage––including the right to restrict circulation of cultural property––and support the design of archives and virtual exhibits on Aboriginal terms. download the video/audio>

Nicole B. Ellison on the Benefits of Facebook “Friends”

New research co-authored by Nicole Ellison — Associate Professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University — attempts to identify specific Facebook-enabled behaviors that contribute to users’ ability to access diverse perspective, novel information, and social support. In this talk Professor Ellison provides an overview of this research and explores the link between bridging social capital levels and Facebook-related factors such as time on site, the number of Facebook Friends, and a set of behaviors called “Cultivation of Social Resources.” download the video/audio>