Hyper-Public: A Symposium on Designing Privacy and Public Space

June 9-10, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Technology is transforming privacy and reshaping what it means to be in public. Our interactions—personal, professional, financial, etc.—increasingly take place online, where they are archived, searchable, and easily replicated. Discussions of privacy often focus solely on the question of how to protect privacy. But a thriving public sphere, whether physical or virtual, is also essential to society. Hyper-Public: A Symposium on Designing Privacy and Public Space, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, will bring together computer scientists, ethnographers, architects, historians, artists and legal scholars to discuss how design influences privacy and public space, how it shapes and is shaped by human behavior and experience, and how it can cultivate norms such as tolerance and diversity. Confirmed participants include danah boyd (Microsoft Research), Herbert Burkert (University of St. Gallen), Gerhard Buurman (Zurich University of the Arts), Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University) Judith Donath (Berkman Center), Paul Dourish (UC Irvine), Urs Gasser (Berkman Center) Adam Greenfield (Urbanscale LLC), Jef Huang (Berkman Center), Jeff Jarvis (CUNY Grad School of Journalism), Betsy Masiello (Google), Nicholas Negroponte (MIT), Charles Nesson (Berkman Center), Martin Nowak ((Harvard University), John Palfrey (Berkman Center), Julia Scher (Academy of Media Arts Cologne), Latanya Sweeney (Harvard CRCS), Laurent Stalder (ETHZ), David Weinberger (Berkman Center/Harvard Library Innovation Lab), (Berkman Center), Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center), and many more. Registration is closed, but keep an eye out on our site for updates from the symposium and video from the event afterwards. more information on our website>

Ethnographies of Access, Ownership, and Collaboration in the Virtual Museum

Tuesday, June 14, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

Museums and academic institutions are rapidly digitizing their ethnographic collections to make them accessible to the public and to communities from which they originated. These practices both amplify the public nature of institutional collections, and create opportunities for re-thinking how collections should be shared online. In (post) colonial contexts, the virtual museum is a productive location of Aboriginal self-representation, where global heritage policies and institutional practices interface with Aboriginal paradigms of knowledge circulation, ethics, and control. Based on collaboratively designed virtual museum projects with Dane-zaa and Inuvialuit communities in Canada, I show that access to digital collections can both facilitate the reclaiming of intellectual property rights and copyright of cultural heritage––including the right to restrict circulation of cultural property––and support the design of archives and virtual exhibits on Aboriginal terms. These projects highlight Aboriginal remediation of digital collections as alternative modes of thinking about the design and activation of networked technologies in diverse cultural and institutional contexts. Kate Hennessy, is an Assistant Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. She is an anthropologist and new media artist with a PhD in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia and an MA in the Anthropology of Media from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. As the director of the Making Culture Lab, her research explores the role of digital technology in the documentation and safeguarding of cultural heritage, and the mediation of culture, history, objects, and subjects in new forms. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Glenn Otis Brown

Tuesday, June 21, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

Glenn Otis Brown will present at the Berkman Center Luncheon Series. Details TBA. Glenn Otis Brown, is Director of Business Development at Twitter. He was previous music business development manager at YouTube. Before that, he worked as a products counsel at Google, where he worked on Google Image Search, Blogger, Google Talk, the Google WiFi initiative, and Google Sitemaps, among many other projects. Glenn was Executive Director of Creative Commons from summer 2002 through spring 2005. In 2003-2004, Glenn was a lecturer at Stanford Law School, where he co-taught a class on copyright licensing with Lawrence Lessig. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Miriam Meckel on Drivers of Online Trust

User trust has been identified as a key success factor of online business: A user's willingness to provide personal data is a prerequisite for online transactions. But the qualities that communicate trustworthiness to a user are varied and difficult to parse. Miriam Meckel — Professor for Corporate Communication at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and the Managing Director of the Institute for Media and Communication Management — discusses the results of a recent study of users of online services, and identifies the nine core drivers of online trust. download the video/audio>

Nicole B. Ellison on the Benefits of Facebook “Friends”

New research co-authored by Nicole Ellison — Associate Professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University — attempts to identify specific Facebook-enabled behaviors that contribute to users’ ability to access diverse perspective, novel information, and social support. In this talk Professor Ellison provides an overview of this research and explores the link between bridging social capital levels and Facebook-related factors such as time on site, the number of Facebook Friends, and a set of behaviors called “Cultivation of Social Resources.” download the video/audio>