Berkman Buzz: March 29, 2013

My students – and the rest of us – are partly who others say we are. That's a key reason why each of us needs to be one of the voices (preferably the most prominent) defining us. To the extent that they live public lives in any way – and like it or not, it's getting harder not to be public in some way – tomorrow's adults will need an online home that they control. They need an online home, a place where they tell the world who they are and what they've done, where they post their own work, or at least some of it.

A month ago, Mark Donfried from the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) — an organization dedicated to promoting open dialogue — sent me this letter threatening me with legal action because of contributions I’ve made to Wikipedia. Yesterday, he sent me this followup threat.

According to the letters, Donfried has threatened me with legal action because I participated in a discussion on Wikipedia that resulted in his organization’s article being deleted. It is not anything I wrote in any Wikipedia article that made Donfried so upset — although Donfried is also unhappy about at least one off-hand comment I made during the deletion discussion on a now-deleted Wikipedia process page. Donfried is unhappy that my actions, in small part, have resulted in his organization not having an article in Wikipedia. He is able to threaten me personally because — unlike many people — I edit Wikipedia using my real, full, name.

Facebook's data science team examines users changing icons to support marriage equality: https://t.co/AQQ0Uauaw1
—Ethan Zuckerman (@ethanz)

My first interest in the web was geeky, not scholarly, I admit. But the evidence turned me around pretty quickly. The OA editions of my publications were reaching a larger part of my intended audience than the originals, even years after first publication. They were also reaching a larger unintended audience than would ever have found or looked for the originals...I began to feel that OA was to conventional publication roughly what conventional publication was to handwritten correspondence.

Two weeks ago, I gave the opening keynote at the Digital Media and Learning conference in Chicago. The conference, which explores how digital media is and could be changing education and learning, focused on the theme of “Democratic Futures: Mobilizing Voices and Remixing Youth Participation“. In the spirit of the theme, my talk examined how digital media is changing how we participate in the civic life of our communities and the world as a whole, and how we might teach a new, digital civics.

This is an issue I’ve been thinking through since coming to the Center for Civic Media at MIT. My friends at the Knight Foundation and the founders of the Center – Henry Jenkins, Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Mitch Resnick – believed that our capacity to participate in governance and work for change is expanded and shifted through tools and techniques newly at our disposal. While there’s good reasons to believe this is true – digital tools make it easier to share your views with large groups of people, to find like-minded people to work with on change, and to raise attention and money – there are also reasons for skepticism that new paths to participation will have the power and impact of older, more established forms of civic participation. I don’t have the answer to the question of whether digital civics is all that different from older models, or whether it’s more effective, but I’ve been trying to introduce language that makes it easier to have these debates.

There is a scholarly politics to research methods that I find baffling. Some people consider qualitative research methods—like interviews and observations—to be squishy or lacking rigor. Some folks find quantitative methods—like social network analysis or econometrics— to be myopic or dehumanizing. In different departments or schools, certain methods are held in esteem and others in disdain. It seems completely self-evident to me that all of these forms of inquiry, when applied carefully and thoughtfully to the right questions, can lead to insight. Calling one set better than another is like calling chocolate ice cream better than vanilla ice cream; of course some people have a personal preference, but the world would be deeply incomplete without either.

Some of the "method wars" that have been fought in the past surface again in the presence of "big data." I think that big data and small data should be besties, and thus I rise in defense of methodological pluralism.

I was rather curious to hear what @civicMIT was thinking re: the [=] on FB. @natematias was kind enough to provide: http://t.co/cu37EqPsF0 >
—Andy Sellars (@andy_sellars)

Finding a job in today's tough economy is hard. But for Japanese college students, the country's ultra-competitive recruitment process or “shu-katsu” which starts a year or more before graduation, takes things to a whole new level.

Recruitment Rhapsody, an emotional short animated film that captures the rigid and obstacle-ridden job hunt process Japanese students must endure has gone viral with more than 350,000 views.