Skip to the main content

Berkman Buzz: February 10, 2012

The Berkman Buzz is selected weekly from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects.
To subscribe, click here.

The deadline for applications for our Summer 2012 Internship Program is this Sunday!
The deadline for applications for the Nieman-Berkman Fellowship in Journalism Innovation is next Wednesday!

Harry Lewis recalls the early days of Facebook at Harvard

Quotation mark

After talking to a reporter about the Harvard culture around the time Mark Zuckerberg was here, I dug out some old email to jog my memory about the early efforts to move the Harvard House face books online. These were printed brochures with basic information and photos of members of each House, students and resident staff and tutors, which had long been used to create House community. It seems that some Houses started to create online versions of their Face Books around 1996, while I was dean, and I was involved with the discussions of uncoordinated effort duplication and privacy.

 

From Harry Lewis's blog post, "Early Online Harvard Facebook Email Thread"
About Harry Lewis | @HarryRoyLewis

Quotation mark

DPLA Dev Blog: Karen Coyle on modern data for the modern library http://hrvd.me/xoxrQA
DPLA Dev Team (@dpladev)

 

Zeynep Tufekci discusses digital dualism

Video

All these examples of how the online interacts with offline are clear example of why questions like “face-to-face or online friendship?” or “was online or offline more important in the Arab spring?” are not fruitful. The answer is yes. Because there is no “virtual” world separate from this world. As Nathan Jurgenson, who often writes about “digital dualism”, puts it the correct model to understand the Internet is not that the Internet is the “Matrix” and this world is “Zion” a la the movie Matrix. The world is one.

 

From Zeynep Tufekci's blog post, "Breaking Bread, Breaking Digital Dualism"
About Zeynep Tufekci | @techsoc

The Citizen Media Law Project explores social media in the courtroom

Quotation mark

The Federal Judicial Center has released a study which concludes that "detected social media use by jurors is infrequent, and that most judges have taken steps to ensure jurors do not use social media in the courtroom," and implies that juror use of the Internet and social media during trial is not a growing problem.

Alison Frankel of Thompson-Reuters is skeptical about this conclusion, and I agree with her.

 

From Eric P. Robinson's post for the Citizen Media Law Project blog, "See No Evil: Study Says Judges Don't Find Jurors Using Social Media"
About the Citizen Media Law Project | @citmedialaw

Wayne Marshall explains "the Toto ‘Africa’ meme"

Quotation mark

Africa Is a Country, a wry but passionate blog devoted to “Africa” — the idea, not (simply) the song — in contemporary media (but “not about famine, Bono, or Barack Obama”) has been threatening to make a weekly series out of the genuinely remarkable resonance of Toto’s 1982 soft-rock anthem. It’s a begrudging tribute of sorts to the song’s “resilience as a piece of media about Africa.” Did you know that in addition to dozens of covers, which they promise to feature, the song is also popular sampling fodder for hip-hop producers (among them, Madlib).

 

From Wayne Marshall's blog post, "Is 'Africa' 'Actually' African?"
About Wayne Marshall | @wayneandwax

Quotation mark

Brazil may be first to use Twitter's geo-located censorship to block tweets about drunk driving checkpoints http://t.co/nrn8AISyHerdict (@herdict)

 

metaLAB cofounder visualizes global art

Quotation mark

MetaLAB cofounder Robert Gerard Pietrusko has collaborated with Stewart Smith and Bernd Lintermann in a piece called trans_actions: The Accelerated Art World 1989–2011, which explores the impact of the worldwide explosion of art biennials through immersive, panoramic visualizations of data on the global art market and the migration of art, artists, and their audiences.

 

From Matthew Battles's blog post for metaLAB, "Visualizing global art "
About metaLAB | @metalabharvard

Weekly Global Voices: Maldives: Marred by Violence

Quotation mark

The political crisis in the Maldives took an ugly turn on Wednesday 8 February, 2012, when police brutally beat and injured supporters of the ousted President Mohamed Nasheed as they protested against what they claimed to be a coup that removed the island nation's first democratically elected president from power.

In the riots that followed, Nasheed's supporters torched and destroyed a number of police stations, courts, local council offices and other public buildings. Scores of police officers were hurt in the violence too.

 

From Saffah Faroog's blog post for Global Voices Online, "Maldives: Marred by Violence"
About Global Voices Online | @globalvoices

This Buzz was compiled by Rebekah Heacock.

To manage your subscription preferences, please click here.