Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
April 2, 2009 // Upcoming events and digital media

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[1] [TUESDAY 4/7/09] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "The LOLCat-hedral and the Bizarre: A Memescape Manifesto" with Tim Hwang (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/04/hwang)

[2] [WEDNESDAY 4/8/09] "CouchSurfing: What one website reveals about the future of the net" with Couchsurfing Founder Daniel Hoffer and Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/hoffer)

[TUESDAY] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on THE LOLCAT-HEDRAL AND THE BIZARRE
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4/7/09, 12:30 PM ET, Berkman Center Conference Room
RSVP is required (rsvp@cyber.harvard.edu).

Topic: The LOLCat-hedral and the Bizarre: A Memescape Manifesto
Guest: Tim Hwang, Berkman Center

What's the link between Rick Astley and funny cat pictures? How about "alpaca sheep" and Anonymous? Is internet culture as a whole fundamentally random, or does an underlying pattern link these phenomena? This talk will look back on 2008 in the meme universe, explore the ecosystem of hardware and software that undergirds internet culture and will attempt to use this approach to peek into the trends that will shape web celebrity and culture in the future. Topics to be covered include: Digg, the crashing world economy, 4chan, stuff white people like, and Yochai Benkler.

About Tim

Tim Hwang is the founder of ROFLCon, a series of celebrations to gather the individuals behind various online phenomena and researchers to discuss the emerging space of internet culture and celebrity. For his work, he has been featured in Wired Magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and was a speaker at this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference. He is also a researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where his work focuses on the mechanisms of online collaboration, internet filtering, and the networked public sphere.  In his spare time he currently is organizing a research group to track the "environmental health" of the social layer of the web and is in the process of working on a book about online communities and the internet's cultural history. He blogs regularly on pop culture and technology at the USBFB and on Twitter @timhwang.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/04/hwang

[WEDNESDAY] COUCHSURFING: WHAT ONE WEBSITE REVEALS ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET
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4/8/09, 2:00 PM ET, Pound Hall Room 100, Harvard Law School
Map: http://map.harvard.edu/level3.cfm?mapname=camb_allston&tile=F6&quadrant=C&series=N

Free and Open to the Public

RSVP Requested (rsvp@cyber.harvard.edu)

Topic: CouchSurfing: What one website reveals about the future of the net
Guest: Daniel Hoffer, Founder of Couchsurfing & Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School

Daniel Hoffer, Founder and Chairman of CouchSurfing, will be interviewed by Berkman Faculty Co-Director and Professor of Law Jonathan Zittrain.

CouchSurfing is a worldwide network for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit.

About Daniel

Daniel Hoffer has been working with online communities and the Internet since 1990, when he ran an online Bulletin Board System (BBS) and created a statewide educational program in Massachusetts to connect physically disabled patients with elementary and high school students online.

Daniel first worked closely with CouchSurfing co-founders Casey Fenton and Sebastien Letuan in 1999 at Fuxito Worldwide, a venture-backed international soccer website he co-founded. Since then, Daniel has worked full-time as a management consultant, in corporate strategy at NEC Corporation, and in sales and marketing at Siebel Systems, in marketing at Sibel Systems and in product management at Symantec.

Daniel has appeared on the cover of Inc. Magazine and been featured on the front page of the Boston Globe, as well as on ABC Nightline, NBC News, National Public Radio, and in the New York Times and Time Magazine. He has also been a guest lecturer at Columbia Business School, the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley, UCLA Anderson School of Business, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and MacWorld Expo. Daniel serves or has served on the Board of Directors of CouchSurfing International, the American Jewish Commitee, the Association for Strategic Planning, Chi Fountain, the Harvard Club of Silicon Valley, and on the Advisory Boards of Tangerine Wellness and Inner Circle Logistics.

Daniel received a BA from Harvard College in Philosophy and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/hoffer

OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
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[1] 4/2/09 "From Cybercrime to Cyberconflict" with Dr. Phillip Hallam-Baker (http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=2188)

[2] 4/2/09 MIT Communications Forum on "Film Music and Digital Media" (http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/film_music.html)

[3] 4/4/09 Information Superhighway Five (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/informationsuperhighway)

[4] 4/4/09 "Symposium to Explore the Future of Digital Collections" (http://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/reference/archive/2009/02/16/library-2-0-symposium-to-explore-the-future-of-digital-collections.aspx)

[5] 4/8/09 C4FCM Lecture Series: "Sam Gregory of Witness" (http://civic.mit.edu/event/c4fcm-lecture-series-sam-gregory-of-witness)

[6] 5/2/09 New Media Literacy's "Learning in a Participatory Culture" (http://newmedialiteracies.org/)

DIGITAL MEDIA: Watch and Listen
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Did you miss this week's luncheon talk? Catch up with Berkman videos, podcasts, pictures, and dig in to our archive at http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive.

-RADIO BERKMAN: YOU as the Future of Commerce (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/podcasts/radioberkman115)

-BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES with VICTORIA STODDEN on "The Future of Computational Science: Information Sharing and Reproducibility" (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/luncheons/2009/03/stodden)

-THE WIKIPEDIA REVOLUTION: A Web of Ideas Talk with ANDREW LIH and DAVID WEINBERGER (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2009/03/lih)

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BERKMAN CALENDAR
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See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, conferences, and more: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events. All of our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.

ABOUT US
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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.harvard.edu.