Berkman Buzz: October 14, 2011
A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.
* Miriam Meckel examines serendipity
* Dan Gillmor laments Blackberry and Apple's "rotten week"
* CMLP explores freedom of expression under pleasant authoritarianism
* Ethan Zuckerman recaps Joi Ito's talk on openness and the MIT Media Lab
* Betsy Masiello explores using social networking behavior to predict behavior problems
* Weekly Global Voices: "Malawi: Death of a Student Activist and a Campaign of Terror"
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The full buzz.
"We, the creators of the Internet, are on our best way to banishing serendipity from our lives. But how high is the price we are paying? Are we exchanging a challenging but exciting life for a predictable but dull one? Our revolution against serendipity is a silent one, as it is our mere usage of the Internet that gives the algorithms of Google, Facebook & Co. the opportunity to calculate our preferences, interests, desires and our next steps, thus gradually banishing everything unexpected from our digital lifestyle."
From Miriam Meckel's blog post, "SOS – SAVE OUR SERENDIPITY"
"In the annals of bad weeks, consider what's happened in the past few days to mobile device maker Research in Motion, or RIM – a systemwide outage just as Apple started selling its latest iPhone. Insert the letter 'r' in 'outage', and you sum up the mood of its customers: outrage."
From Dan Gillmor's post for The Guardian, "BlackBerry and Apple's rotten week"
"The United States is something of an outlier in the world when it comes to hate speech. Whereas laws prohibiting hate speech in the U.S. are simply unconstitutional (barring the various unprotected exceptions like obscenity, incitement, etc.), the majority of Western countries ban hate speech outright. Of course, those same countries also generally protect freedom of speech. The natural tension between hate speech bans and free speech rights can make for some interesting cases, one of which is now playing out in Canada."
From Arthur Bright's blog post for the Citizen Media Law Project, "Hate Speech v. Freedom of Expression in a 'Pleasantly Authoritarian Country' (aka Canada)"
"When he accepted the job as director of the MIT Media Lab, Joi tells us, Nicholas Negroponte warned him, “Don’t ever assume that you run the lab – don’t try to give orders.” This wasn’t too unfamiliar to Joi – it’s like running an open source project, which is something Joi has done for years. In a case like that, you don’t give orders – you show your biases."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "Joi Ito on Openness and the Media Lab"
"I was really struck by this article last week describing research that used publicly available Facebook profiles to predict students likely to suffer from alcohol abuse. The article suggests toward the end that there is an open question of how appropriate it is to go scanning students’ public Facebook profiles for behavior that might be suggestive of a drinking problem—this to me misses the point, and detracts from more important questions."
From Betsy Masiello's blog post, "Using social networking behavior to predict behavior problems"
"Early on the morning of Saturday September 24, 2011, a University of Malawi Polytechnic student was found lying stiff on a paved surface, next to a pool of blood, on the university campus. His name was Robert Chasowa, and he was dead. Early whispers suggested suicide, including a question posted on an unlisted google forum for Malawian journalists. Chasowa was said to have had a cut on the back of his head, and not everyone was buying the suicide suggestion."
From Steve Sharra's post for Global Voices, "Malawi: Death of a Student Activist and a Campaign of Terror"
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Compiled by Rebekah Heacock.
The Berkman Buzz is selected weekly from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects and sometimes from the Center's wider network.
Suggestions and feedback about the Buzz are always welcome and can be emailed to buzz@cyber.harvard.edu.