Radio Berkman

Radio Berkman episodes:

• 01.11.2019

  A spotlight on Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow Jonathan Jackson

  Jonathan Jackson is a co-founder of Blavity Inc., a technology and media company for black millennials. Blavity’s mission is to "economically and creatively support Black millennials across the African diaspora, so they can pursue the work they love, and change...

  
• 12.07.2018

  A spotlight on 2018 Berkman Klein Fellow Amy Zhang

  Berkman Klein Center interns sat down with 2018 Berkman Klein Center Fellow Amy Zhang, to discuss her work on combating online harassment and misinformation as well as her research as a Fellow.

  
• 11.02.2018

  How Youth Are Reinventing Instagram and Why Having Multiple Accounts Is Trending

  According to a recent Pew Research Center study, Instagram is the second most popular platform among 13 to 17-year-olds in the US, after YouTube. Nearly 72 percent of US teenagers are on the image sharing platform. Our Youth & Media team...

  
• 11.29.2017

  When a Bot is the Judge

  We encounter algorithms all the time. There are algorithms that can guess within a fraction of a percentage point whether you’ll like a certain movie on Netflix, a post on Facebook, or a link in a Google search. But Risk Assessment...

  
• 12.15.2016

  Fake News & How To Stop It

  Even before Election Day, 2016, observers of technology & journalism were delivering warnings about the spread of fake news. Headlines like “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump For President” and “Donald Trump Protestor Speaks Out, Was Paid $3500 To...

  
• 05.18.2016

  The Chilling Effect

  The effects of surveillance on human behavior have long been discussed and documented in the real world. That nervous feeling you get when you notice a police officer or a security camera? The one that forces you to straighten up...

  
• 05.02.2016

  Star Wars vs Copyright

  "George Lucas built a whole new industry with Star Wars." says Peter S. Menell, devoted science fiction fan and a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law, who studies copyright and intellectual property law. "But what funds that remarkable...

  
• 03.10.2016

  The Rise and Tumble of the Tumblr Teen

  In her article "The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens," Elspeth Reeve tells the stories of some of Tumblr's most popular bloggers -kids who started their blogs in high school, made a ton of money and then inexplicably disappeared. In this...

  
• 02.25.2016

  How Fair Use Works, in Six Minutes or Less

  An artist, musician, or writer can’t just take another person's creation and claim it as their own. Federal law outlines how creators can and can’t borrow from each other. These rules are collectively called "copyright law," and essentially they give...

  
• 02.08.2016

  Digital Alter Egos

  Are you really "you" online? We asked around for stories of digital alter egos — secret identities that people maintain on the web and try to keep separate from their real life identities. And it turns out there are lots of reasons...

  
• 11.20.2015

  Technology on Trial

  You've likely heard of Silk Road - the black market e-commerce hub that was shutdown in 2013 for becoming a magnet for vendors of illicit goods. But the story of its shutdown, and the investigation and trial that followed, is...

  
• 11.06.2015

  Digital Trash

  On your computer, you don’t ever really "take out the trash." Data doesn’t get picked up by a garbage truck. It doesn’t decompose in a landfill. It just accumulates. And because space is becoming less and less of an issue -- hard...

  
• 10.30.2015

  What We Choose to Censor

  Facebook has had a lot of trouble with misogynistic speech. A few years ago, several women’s groups joined together to petition Facebook to work harder to block misogynistic pages, posts, and replies. At the time Facebook had strict standards against...

  
• 10.22.2015

  The Ad Block Wars

  A recent New York Times survey of the top 50 news sites showed that blocking ads while surfing their mobile news sites could save up to 14 megabytes per page loaded. 14 megabytes adds up to 30 seconds over 4G,...

  
• 09.22.2015

  Cynthia Rudin on The Next Generation of Search Engines

  The current generation of search engines just tells you where to find information (returns a list of webpages). The next generation of search engines could anticipate what you are searching for, and actually find the information for you. In this conversation,...

  
• 09.03.2015

  Towards a More Inclusive Web

  Ethnographer Whitney Phillips embedded with the trolls of 4chan, observing for years how anonymous members of its subversive "b" forum memed, pranked, harassed, and abused, all for the "lolz" — the thrill of doing something shocking. The result: a book, "This...

  
• 08.13.2015

  How Block Chain Will Change the World

  Bitcoin is having its 7th birthday, and its promise to change the way the world thinks about money is looking less and less hyperbolic. For one, the block chain technology underlying Bitcoin - the public ledger that makes the exchange transparent...

  
• 08.05.2015

  Interview with musician and Berkman 2015-2016 fellow Damon Krukowski

  Our full interview with Damon Krukowski referenced in this episode: https://soundcloud.com/radioberkman/pay-the-musician

  
• 08.05.2015

  Pay the Musician

  The market for recorded music has undergone at least three major reinventions since the dawn of the Internet. At the turn of the century illegal downloading ate away at the music industry’s bottom line. Then the iTunes music store made...

  
• 07.31.2015

  Can you copyright a joke?

  With 316 million users posting 500 million tweets a day, someone is bound to write an unoriginal tweet now and then. But there are some Twitter users whose entire existence relies completely on plagiarizing tiny jokes and relatable observations created by...

  
• 07.27.2015

  Reddit: Community? Or Business?

  Reddit is sometimes called "the frontpage of the Internet." 170 million people a month help upload, curate, and make viral the cat photos, prank videos, and topical discussions that help fuel our neverending thirst for content. But recent moves by Reddit...

  
• 07.15.2015

  Fiber City

  Why are over 450 towns in the US building their own high speed Internet networks? Let's look at the example of the small town of Holyoke, Massachusetts. A few years back the town's mayor asked if the local cable or telephone companies...

  
• 07.09.2015

  Going Public

  Public spaces function based on a varying give-and-take relationship with community members. Publicly supported media -- whether it be college radio, a local NPR station, cable access, or PBS -- shares the word "public," but traditionally doesn’t have the same...

  
• 07.01.2015

  How to Stop Traffic

  The International Labour Organization estimates that between forced labor and the commercial sex trade, more than 20 million men, women, and children are being trafficked internationally. The web plays a huge role in keeping trafficking industries viable, but new technology is...

  
• 06.25.2015

  Trusting the Platform

  The more comfortable we get using digital platforms the more important it becomes to understand our relationships to them. From Facebook, to Fitbit, to Wikipedia, to networked games, and even to our schools and employers, the more we entrust our...

  
• 06.17.2015

  Whose App Is It Anyway?

  You may be familiar with a typical hack-day or hack-a-thon. Throw a group of developers and creators in a conference room for the weekend, and they'll come up with some amazing app or product to make life better for all...

  
• 06.08.2015

  The Threats and Tradeoffs of Big Data

  A lot of personal information about you is completely invisible, intangible, and racing around cyberspace on a mission to pay your bills and geolocate your Facebook status. And, of course, this is useful and in a lot of ways really...

  
• 06.01.2015

  RB 217: Don't Hate the Player, Change the Game

  Few sectors of the networked environment get a worse reputation for hate speech than online gaming. Competitive games with chat functions have always involved some level of trash talking. Slurs, shaming, and casual threats are part of the players' toolkit...

  
• 03.24.2015

  RB216: The Internet — A Yearbook

  In Radio Berkman 216 we tackle the web as we know it in 2014-2015. Hate speech online, freedom of speech online, censorship and surveillance online, and, of course, whether our smart machines are out to destroy us. All of these stories...

  
• 02.02.2015

  RB 215: Prometheus and the Dolphins

  Not long ago, illegally downloading a movie could land you in court facing millions of dollars in fines and jailtime. But Hollywood has begun to weather the storm by offering alternatives to piracy — same day digital releases, better streaming,...

  
• 12.09.2014

  RB 214: CopyrightXXX

  Not long ago, illegally downloading a movie could land you in court facing millions of dollars in fines and jailtime. But Hollywood has begun to weather the storm by offering alternatives to piracy — same day digital releases, better streaming,...

  
• 05.01.2014

  RB213: The Public Spectrum

  Most of the spectrum of frequency that exists in the US is occupied or owned by large wireless corporations, cable companies, by the government. But at least one small chunk of spectrum — “low-band spectrum” wireless, or TV white spaces...

  
• 09.17.2013

  RB 212: Richard Price on Academia.edu

  In January of 2012 a British mathematician posted a humble invitation on his blog for fellow academics and researchers to join him in boycotting the prestigious research publisher Elsevier. Citing high prices, exploitative bundling practices, and lobbying efforts to prevent...

  
• 07.25.2013

  RB211: Bruce Schneier on Surveillance and Security

  Revelations of the NSA’s data surveillance efforts have raised serious questions about the ethics and necessity of violating privacy that have been bubbling under the surface for some time. Efforts to monitor communication are nothing new, but electronically mediated communication has...

  
• 03.14.2013

  RB210: The New Knowledge Worker

  As high school and college students transition into a knowledge economy they face both advantages and challenges with how they find information and engage with co-workers as teammates. As a recent study of US employers and recent college graduates discovered, some...

  
• 11.08.2012

  RB209: Crisis Spotting (Drone Humanitarianism II)

  What if you could witness a crime taking place from space, and even step in to prevent it? A group of researchers at Harvard’s Humanitarian Initiative are trying to do exactly that. As the nation of Sudan faced a complex crisis —...

  
• 11.02.2012

  RB208: The NetRoots

  How have politically engaged organizations used the web to fundamentally change how people organize and engage politically? Why are left wing organizations more likely to succeed in organization online? Why are conservatives less funny than liberals? David Karpf chronicles the dozens...

  
• 10.04.2012

  RB207: Hacking Censorship (Drone Humanitarianism I)

  The Internet exists and persists on the border between helpful and harmful, between freedom and totalitarianism, access to knowledge and censorship. But as long as technology is adaptable activists will be learning and creating workarounds to spread information and promote change. Enter...

  
• 08.16.2012

  RB 206: Unlocking Research

  Disseminating knowledge was once a costly undertaking. The expenses of printing, distributing, and housing the work of researchers and scholars left most research in the hands of publishers, journals, and institutions in a system that has evolved over centuries. And...

  
• 07.09.2012

  RB205: Remembering Elinor Ostrom

  Nobel Laureate and Economist Elinor Ostrom passed away last month at the age of 78. Best recognized for her research into the management of common pool resources, Ostrom broke new ground with her findings that Commons were not inherently tragic, as...

  
• 06.14.2012

  RB204: The Art and Science of Working Together

  If you’ve ever experienced the problem of a dead cell phone battery and only incompatible chargers within reach, you’ve experienced one of the minor frustrations of a non-interoperable system. This frustration — not to mention the environmental waste of having...

  
• 06.01.2012

  RB203: From Digital Uprising to Digital Society

  Lots of digital ink has been spilled about how and whether digital technology played a critical role in bringing about the Arab Spring. But it’s been 18 months since the spark of revolution was first lit in Tunisia, way back...

  
• 05.21.2012

  RB 188: SOPA on the Ropes(?)

  The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — a U.S. House bill that would give the Department of Justice the authority to demand that ISPs block sites accused of hosting pirated content — seemed to be doing well. Nearly half of...

  
• 05.21.2012

  RB 187: Facing the Music

  2011 has been a big year for quintuple threat actor/writer/comedian/rapper Donald Glover. For the last decade he released rap, remixes, and mixtapes on the web completely for free under the names Childish Gambino and MC DJ. Not just free of...

  
• 05.21.2012

  RB 186: World of Lawcraft

  Video games aren’t just, well, fun and games. When you pop open a video game — be it Farmville on Facebook for your smartphone or World of Warcraft on your $10,000 immersive gaming setup — you are entering into any...

  
• 05.21.2012

  RB 185: The Next Generation Library

  What would a digital version of your public library look like? There’s more to it than e-books and digital reading devices. Librarians, scholars, innovators, and techno-wizards are collaborating under the mantle of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to...

  
• 05.21.2012

  RB 184: Intellectual Property — Not Just For Lawyers Anymore

  It’s time to stop thinking about intellectual property as something purely for your legal counsel to deal with. That’s the driving idea behind John Palfrey’s aptly titled new book Intellectual Property Strategy. Companies and institutions that have to worry about creative...

  
• 05.21.2012

  RB 183: The Cooperation

  Are human beings — as consultants, researchers, and the authors of business books have thought for years — fundamentally motivated by self interest? Or is there a deeper cooperative instinct that drives us to work? Those are the questions that fuel...

  
• 05.21.2012

  Radio Berkman 182: Fear of a Networked Fourth Estate

  “Wikileaks” has become something of a neverending story. Coverage has branched out beyond the revelations of the documents allegedly leaked by Pfc. Bradley Manning in 2010, and on to ancillary territory: the flamboyant presence of founder Julian Assange; the legal...

  
• 05.21.2012

  Radio Berkman 181: The Management (Rethinking Music VII)

  In our last episode we talked about how artists can feel besieged from all sides. Fans, promoters, labels — when you’re talented and famous everyone wants a piece of you. Today’s guest is one of the most important people in a...