Law School for Digital Journalists; Social Media and Dynamics of Collective Action under Authoritarian Regimes; islawmix

Law School for Digital Journalists

Thursday, September 22, All Day, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA.

Join us at Harvard Law School on Thursday, September 22, for a full day of unprecedented immersion in the legal challenges facing digital journalists. The Online News Association, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy present Law School for Digital Journalists, part of the Pre-Conference day at ONA’s 2011 Conference & Awards Banquet, September 22-24 in Boston. This intensive day of practical legal training will cover what digital journalists need to know about how the law impacts their profession, both on the editorial and business sides. Classes will be taught by leading media lawyers and journalism educators. With so much to cover, we plan to run parallel tracks during the day so that if you miss a key session in the morning, you can catch it in the afternoon. Registration is open to the public. Registration Required. more information on our website>

From Tehran to Tahrir: Social Media and Dynamics of Collective Action under Authoritarian Regimes

Tuesday, September 27, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

From Zeynep: What role did the new media ecology play in the ouster of long-standing dictators in Egypt and Tunisia as well as the continuing unrest across the region? In this talk, I present data from a large protester survey (n=1050) undertaken in Tahrir during February of 2011 and conceptually examine how the new media ecology, composed of satellite TVs, social media and cell phones, upsets the erstwhile stable dynamics of repression under “durable authoritarianism.” (Data collected by the Tahrir Data Project, run by the Engine Room research collective.) In short, authoritarian regimes often survive by creating a collective action problem for their citizenry through isolation, censorship and repression of dissent (“whack-a-protest”); social media introduces novel dynamics to this old game by changing the shape of connectivity networks, by facilitating information and action cascades, by undermining censorship and by facilita ting the formation of new publics. Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill at the School of Information and Library Science with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Sociology. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

islawmix: content and context for Islamic law in the news

Tuesday, October 4, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

Recent years have seen an uptick in coverage of Islamic law (shar??a) in American news media, policy, and academic circles—typically producing more questions than answers. What are the rules that dictate how Muslims in America conduct themselves? How do or should our legal institutions respond? When reporting on issues involving Muslims, how can journalists or academics distinguish individual preference or culture from Islamic law? What available, authoritative resources can best inform interested readers, from the casual to the scholarly? In short, Islamic law now seems to matter for issues of American law and policy; and it has long been a subject ripe for comparative law. But there is no reliable source of information on just what Islamic law is. Depending on the source, definitions of it can be vague, confusing, and even contradictory. islawmix aims to fill the information gap in this important area. In this talk, we will walk through “why islawmix” and explore how islawmix aims to accomplish the rather ambitious task of providing accessible resources for parsing such complex information and developing resources for the aggregation and contextualization of significant trends in Islamic law. Intisar A. Rabb is on the law faculty at Boston College Law School—where she teaches comparative Islamic law and legal history, advanced constitutional law, and criminal law—and is a faculty affiliate in research at Harvard Law School in the Islamic Legal Studies Program. Umbreen Bhatti is a co-founder of islawmix and a lawyer with experience in civil rights and constitutional law. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest

Tuesday, October 18, 6:00PM, Harvard Law School.

Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) is one of the world’s top thinkers on cooperative structures. In his new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest, he uses evidence from neuroscience, economics, sociology, biology, and real-world examples to break down the myth of self-interest and replace it with a model of cooperation in our businesses, our government, and our lives. Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. (Photo via Joi) RSVP Required. more information on our website>

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

Last week, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Dean's Office at Harvard Law School, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism co-hosted a special event with former chairman of the FCC Newton N. Minow. At the event, he reflected on his 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 drew parallels to its relevance in light of new challenges presented by the digital age. We have posted video from the event to our site, and also wanted to share articles and resources from around the web that covered the event, which featured many special guests -- including two other former FCC chairmen, faculty, journalists, practitioners, and more. video/audio on our website>