MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

How is the generation born in the digital age different from its analog ancestors? Are those born digital likely to have different notions of privacy, community, identity itself? How do educators approach this generation to help prepare them for scholarship and for citizenship?

Speakers: John Palfrey, Head of School at Phillips Academy and author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives; and Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media, a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies/Writing.

Liveblog text: http://cmsw.mit.edu/liveblog-ethan-zuckerman-digital-cosmopolitanism-cognitive-diversity/

New media technologies have sharply increased the number of people who are able to create and disseminate content. But they may not be leading to a more diverse media environment, as tools that allow us to tailor what content we see and what we ignore are becoming more powerful and more personal. The framework of cosmopolitanism suggests a way through this challenge – by examining perspectives we are exposed to and insulated from, we may be able to design tools and approaches that help readers increase their cognitive diversity and prepare themselves to tackle transnational challenges.

Ethan Zuckerman is the Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.

Moderated by Associate Professor Ian Condry.

When a big news story breaks, Twitter goes crazy. Keepr tries to make sense of these periodic bursts by implementing natural language processing and social network analysis algorithms to surface topics, eyewitnesses, and amplifiers. A live demo will be followed by a discussion of the capabilities and limitations of computational newsgathering, along with reports of how it is being used in newsrooms.

Hong Qu is a digital toolmaker. He has led teams at YouTube and Upworthy. He enjoys building social media tools that help us better understand ourselves and the world around us.

From http://rosalindwilliams.com/2013/09/introduction-a-podcast-conversation/

Annotations by Rosalind Williams.

What's In a Slash? by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A generation of great journalists cut their teeth at alt-weeklies, and The Boston Phoenix produced some of the best of them. When the Phoenix announced it was closing last March, the city lost a powerful cultural force and a vibrant source of information.

We discuss the Phoenix‘s legacy and the ways in which its loss will affect Boston.

Panelists are author and essayist Anita Diamant, who started out answering the editor’s phone in the mid-1970s; Charles Pierce of Esquire and NPR, and a staff writer with the Phoenix in the 1980s and ’90s; poet and classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz, who won a Pulitzer Prize with the Phoenix; and Carly Carioli, who started as an intern and rose to become the paper’s editor.

Seth Mnookin moderates.

Roderick Coover, Temple University

Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck

Molly Sauter, MIT

Dan Whaley, hypothes.is

Moderator: James Paradis, MIT

Notions of a "public sphere" have always incited skepticism and qualification, in particular the recognition of "counterpublics" that operate inside and at the margins of consensus discourse. Counterpublics can be spaces of political opposition - sites of resistance, civil disobedience, disruption - or spaces of play and self-fashioning, enabling the emergence of alt-, sub-, and fan cultures and alternative forms of community and identity. How is digital technology - and social media in particular - generating categories of identity and belonging that define themselves in opposition to established norms of personhood or community? How do the counterpublics of the digital age differ from those of the past?

Cristobal Garcia, P. Universidad Catolica (Chile)

Eric Gordon, Emerson College

Henry Jenkins, USC

Maria San Filippo, Harvard University

Moderator: Noel Jackson, MIT

It is a truth universally acknowledged that digital technologies have immensely enhanced existing means of surveillance by government and corporations and have created powerful new instruments to monitor individual behavior. Do the ramifying systems for observing and recording our routine activities fundamentally threaten our privacy and freedom, as many have argued? In an era of dating mining and smart algorithms, is our awareness that we are being monitored, converted to bits and distributed among databases, changing the way we behave as citizens and individuals? Should it do so? Or is this framing of the question too pessimistic, ignoring the fact that many of the world's data collectors are or claim to be improving our lives by expanded productivity, services tailored to individual users, advances not merely in shopping but in health, education and public safety.

Goran Bolin, Sodertorn University (Sweden)

Kelly Gates, University of California, San Diego

Jose van Dijck, University of Amsterdam

Moderator: Ethan Zuckerman, MIT

Amid disquiet over encroachments on privacy by government and corporations, another class of concerns has arisen: That some people (often young users of social media) are not respecting the traditional boundaries of privacy and are choosing to share "too much information." Do these people's technical skills outstrip their social skills? Are they unaware of how information can persist and potentially damage their reputation? Or are the stern adults who question this behavior clinging to an outmoded idea of privacy? Are the apps and algorithms and platforms of social media invisibly transforming norms of privacy and personal freedom?

Feona Attwood, Middlesex University (UK)

David Rosen, author

Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard University

Moderator: Nick Montfort, MIT