Upcoming Events and Digital Media

News and Entertainment in the Digital Age: A Vast Wasteland Revisited

Monday, September 12, 5:00pm ET, Harvard Law School. This event will be webcast live. Co-sponsored by the Dean's Office at Harvard Law School.

In 1961, Newt Minow – then Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission – delivered a landmark speech to the National Association of Broadcasters on “Television and the Public Interest,” in which he described television programming as a "vast wasteland" and advocated for public interest programming. Fifty years later, we aim to reflect upon the changed landscape of television and dramatic shifts in the broader media ecosystem, and identify lessons learned that may help to offer insight into the next 50 years of media and public discourse. This event will feature Newt Minow (Former Chairman of the FCC / Sidley Austin), Dean Martha Minow (Harvard Law School), Ann Marie Lipinski (Nieman Foundation), Jonathan Alter (Bloomberg View), Terry Fisher (Harvard Law School), Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School), John Palfrey (Harvard Law School), Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law School), and many more. Special guests include Susan Crawford (Cardozo School of Law), Perry Hewitt (Harvard University), Ellen Goodman (Rutgers University School of Law - Camden), Reed Hundt (Former Chairman of the FCC), Nicholas Negroponte (One Laptop per Child), Tim Wu (Columbia Law School), Ethan Zuckerman (C4/Berkman Center), and more. Photo via Rantes. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Indigenous technology design and its challenges

Tuesday, September 13, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

From Chris: While many well meaning efforts bring technology design to bear on problems in developing economies, such as Google People Finder, One Laptop Per Child, etc., fewer efforts involve local participants or settings in the design process. I share some of our work on collaboration with youth, NGOs, and technologists in India, Nepal, and Bhutan, and highlight some of the challenges in trying to create indigenous design capacity in places like these. I explore an ecological metaphor of 'invasive and non-invasive species' for different types of technology in new settings, with an eye towards discussing what makes a technology 'invasive' and how healthy technological ecosystems might be developed. Dr. Chris Hoadley is an associate professor and director of the Educational Communications and Technology program at New York University. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

NOW YOU SEE IT: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn

Tuesday, September 20, 6:00PM, Harvard Law School.

When Duke University gave free iPods to the freshman class in 2003, critics called it a waste of money. Yet when students found academic uses for the brand new music devices in virtually every discipline, the iPod experiment proved to be a classic example of the power of disruption – a way of refocusing attention to illuminate unseen possibilities. Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at the time of the iPod experiment, Cathy N. Davidson sees this kind of innovation as the heart of a new way of collaborative, interactive learning ideal for students facing a changing, global future. Using cutting-edge research on the brain and learning, she shows how the phenomenon of “attention blindness” shapes our lives, and how it has led to one of the greatest problems of our historical moment: Although we email, blog, tweet, and text as if by instinct, too many of us toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century, not the one in which we live. We can change that. This talk helps us to think in historical, theoretical, and practical ways about how, as individuals and institutions, we can learn new ways to thrive in the interactive, digital, global world we already inhabit. Cathy N. Davidson served as Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University from 1998 until 2006, where she helped create the Program in Information Science + Information Studies, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and many other programs. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Sascha Meinrath on How Geeks, Wonks, & Field Operatives are Fighting to Transform Inside-the-Beltway Policy-Making

Since its founding in 2009, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative (OTI) has been a catalyst for innovative technology and telecom interventions. OTI is working in Philadelphia and Detroit to build community wireless networks in areas underserved by broadband providers. They also coordinate MeasurementLab.net (M-Lab), an open, distributed, global platform for Internet measurement tools, and the Commotion Mesh Wireless Project (a.k.a., "Internet-in-a-Suitcase") that has gained notoriety during the Arab Spring. Sascha Meinrath — Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative and Research Director of the Foundation's Wireless Future Program — discusses the work of the OTI, and challenges facing the spread of communications technology. download the video/audio>