Radio Berkman

We’ll be back soon with more full episodes of Radio Berkman. In the meantime, we’d like to share a clip from a short interview we did not long ago with Lawrence Liang of the Alternative Law Forum on piracy, media, and culture.

When under threat from an approaching feline, gazelles will repeatedly leap up and down in the air – even when logically it seems they should run. It’s an example of a signal – used to communicate a concept to trigger a reaction. In this case, “I am strong and fast – if you chase me you’ll be wasting your time.”

What does this phenomenon of nature have to do with human communication online? We give off signals all the time – to deceive, to attract, to manipulate, to provoke reactions and establish impressions of who we are. We have gotten used to practices of signaling in person. But the web has completely changed how we signal.

Judith Donath, founder of MIT’s Sociable Media research group, is completing a book on signaling theory and online communications called Signals, Truth, and Design. Today she stops by Radio Berkman to chat about signaling and human behavior on the web.

Creative Commons music used this week from Jeremiah Jacobs.

The closing of another year brings with it an excuse for celebration. And what could be more fun than looking back at the year that was and trying to distill some of the top trends in the web, technology, and society?

David Weinberger attended Supernova 2009 in San Francisco, where some of the biggest names in tech, business, government, and academia came together to talk past, present, and future of networks. He chatted with a number of those thought-leaders, and came away with three major threads for 2009 which might help guide our thinking as we go into 2010:

The Broadband Initiative

The Growth of Real Time Web

The Web and the Obama Administration

So curl up by the fire with your generative digital listening device, pop in those earbuds, and listen in as we reflect on three of the major trends of 2009 with David Weinberger.

Creative Commons music used this week:

Brad Sucks – Gasoline

Morgantj – Raindrops

Is it hard to imagine a world in which people are treated fairly? Paid a fair wage for the work they contribute? Rewarded monetarily for the successful intellectual products that they help to produce?

Did you just scoff? If so you might be a knowledge worker who toils day in and day out on information goods – products like software, vaccines, or media – just to see the company you work for take the copyright or patent and reap all the rewards from your innovation.

A new working paper from researchers at MIT, Boston University, and the University of Michigan shows that people, companies, and the economy as a whole can all benefit and grow when we forget what we think we know about property rights and compensate people fairly for the work they do.

Take off your rose-colored glasses, put on your headphones, and listen to this interview with one of those researchers, Marshall Van Alstyne, as he explains how innovation and fair compensation can go hand in hand.

CC-licensed music this week:

Scott Altham: Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)

Neurowaxx: Haram Beat

Photo by Kevin Eddy

What if a robot could be your closest friend? Know everything about you? Be able to peruse old family photos with you, read your journal entries, know what you are allergic to, and all your deepest darkest secrets?

Put all those romantic notions of science fiction out of your mind. “Digital Companions” are seen by some as a natural extension of computers and the web – and possible within 30 years.

Yorick Wilks is a leading researcher on the Companions Project. We sat down with him to find out more about Digital Companions in our every day life.

This week’s artist:

Robert Rich: Cowell Piano

Is the fate of books a forgone conclusion? Will they just continue to make their way out of print and into digital form? This week’s guest, author Cory Doctorow, suggests that we might want to keep books in print for a little while longer. Not just out of nostalgia – but actually to protect the institution of copyright.

Cory Doctorow — a longtime supporter of remixing and free culture, who releases his books under Creative Commons licenses — now throws his weight behind copyright. Huh?

Find out what happens when books meet bits on this week’s Radio Berkman.

This week’s artists

Coconut Monkeyrocket – Accidental Beatnik

MorganTJ -Time Decay

The “Walled Garden” is an oft-used metaphor to describe an area of the web that is somehow closed off – think AOL in the 90s, or any site that lives behind a paywall. To some, these areas of the net are exclusive avenues to brilliantly curated content. To others “Walled Gardens” are threats to the open nature of the net.

Elizabeth Goodman, a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a design researcher with Intel, has taken the metaphor of the Garden back to its roots (so-to-speak), to see if we can’t reimagine web communities through the lens of these physical spaces.

CC-licensed music this week:

Duckett – Another Girl (instrumental)

_ghost – Ice and Chilli

There are few subjects more potentially divisive as the Free Culture Movement. Free Culture activists believe in a future in which people will be free to remix and distribute creative works like literature, movies, music, software, and images. These are the folks who can toss around phrases like ‘Free as in Speech versus Free as in Beer’ to illustrate distinctions in legal code.

A world where anyone can feel free to edit a photo, remix a song or video, or modify a piece of software without the constraint of excessive laws or artificial limits – sounds great, right? But it raises more questions than you might think.

Gabriella Coleman is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University who has given a lot of thought to the role of genre and piracy in how we might build a Free Culture that works.

She sat down with our guest host Elizabeth Stark for a word or two on some of the toughest questions facing Free Culture.

CC-licensed music this week:

Scott Altham – Hear Us Now (poptastic mix)

_ghost – Ice and Chilli

Few dispute that the web will be the dominant medium of the 21st Century – swallowing whole newspapers, books, radio, television, and the cinema. And even as the web grows virtually – over a trillion unique urls and growing – it shrinks physically – from laptop, to netbook, from cell phone, to even tinier and ubiquitous communication devices.

The growth of the web seems radically different from that of television, radio, and newspapers. It seems like it was so grassroots, so rapid. But Professor W. Russell Neuman of the University of Michigan argues that to predict the growth of the web in the future we need to take a good hard look at just how those 20th Century technologies and infrastructures came to be so dominant.

So, what does history have to say about how this tiny little medium will grow?

CC-licensed music this week:

Neurowaxx: Pop Circus

General Fuzz: Warm Steel

Author and Professor of Public Policy Viktor Mayer-Schönberger believes that digital memory is a little too perfect. Every word you post on the web, every picture, every video, tweet, and email is set in stone, archived, permanently findable. Like the proverbial elephant, the digital world doesn’t forget.

There are incredible benefits to this. And there might be consequences as well, ranging from invasion of privacy, to the impairment of human memory.

David Weinberger spoke with Viktor about some of these consequences, and how we might help our machines learn to forget.

CC-licensed music this week:

Neurowaxx: Carioca

Jaspertine: Pling