Is civics in crisis? Or just changing its shape?
In late January of 2012, Austin Oberbillig and Evan Ricks, students at Olympia High School in Olympia, Washington made a video called “Lunch Scholars“. The video was meant to be a high school version...
View ArticleCorporate America and the Harlem Shake: Perfect Together
When we’re not doing more serious work like documenting geographic and gender biases in media, or helping provide information to domestic workers about their rights, we at the Center for Civic Media...
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Beyond “The Crisis in Civics”– Notes from my 2013 DML talk
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,...
View ArticleCivic Media at Sun Yat Sen University – Hal Abelson
I’m on this road this week, in Guangzhou, China, and in Tokyo, Japan, giving a set of talks at academic conferences and to journalistic organizations. My first stop is at Sun Yat Sen University in...
View ArticleCivic Media at Sun Yat Sen U: Mobiles, ads and games
Eric Klopfer is a professor at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and teaches in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department. His presentation at Sun Yat Sen University focuses on his key...
View ArticleCivic Media at Sun Yat Sen U: Chinese social media innovation
Dean Ran Yang of Sun Yat Sen University’s new school of Mobile Information Engineering starts her talk by showing pictures of Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Seve Chen, Sergey Brin – she argues that these...
View ArticleCivic Media at Sun Yat Sen U: Jing Wang and NGO 2.0
Professor Jing Wang is the organizer of our international symposium at Sun Yat Sen University. She’s the founder of a project called NGO2.0, which teaches participatory and social media tools to...
View ArticleSasha Costanza Chock at Sun Yat Sen University
Friend and colleague Sasha Costanza-Chock leads off the morning at Sun Yat Sen University’s conference on Civic Media with a talk titled, “Transmedia Organizing: Social Media Practices in Occupy Wall...
View ArticleLi Yanhong at Sun Yat Sen University
Yanhong Li, Vice Dean and Associate Professor of Communications at Sun Yat Sen University, offers an example of ancient organizing history in China: a case from four years ago. She tells us about a set...
View ArticleLinking news and action
Swiss author and entrepreneur Rolf Dobelli recently published a provocative essay titled “News is Bad for You” in The Guardian. The essay describes news – particularly fast-breaking, rapidly updated...
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Me and my metadata – thoughts on online surveillance
The NSA documents Edward Snowden leaked have sparked a debate within the US about surveillance. While Americans understood that the US government was likely intercepting telephone and social media data...
View ArticleCharlie DeTar dissertation defense: Intertwinkles and digital tools for...
Charlie DeTar defended his doctoral dissertation this afternoon at the MIT Media Lab. Charlie is a student in Chris Schmandt’s Mobility and Speech group, but has also been an active member of my group,...
View ArticleThe “good citizen” and the effective citizen
With Rewire out in the world, I’ve had some time this August to think about some of the big questions behind our work at Center for Civic Media, specifically the questions I started to bring up at this...
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What We Watch: a new tool for watching how popular videos spread online
More than a billion people a month visit YouTube to watch videos. Sometimes, those billion people watch the same video. More often, they don’t. YouTube shares information about what videos are popular...
View ArticleJen Pahlka and Clay Shirky at Code for America Summit
I’m at Code for America’s 2013 summit in San Francisco today, an impressive gathering put together by an extremely impressive civic innovation organization. I’m one of the advisors to Code for All, a...
View ArticleZeynep Tufekci on protest movements and capacity problems
MIT’s Comparative Media Studies hosts a weekly colloquium, and this week’s featured speaker is sociologist and movement theorist, Zeynep Tufekci. Zeynep describes herself as a scholar of social...
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Paul’s Pit Crew – Center for Civic Media Supports Out of Eden Walk
Paul Salopek is a journalist, a storyteller and an explorer. As a foreign correspondent, he covered stories in fifty countries and won two Pulitzer prizes, one for his reporting on conflicts on the...
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Kate Darling on Robot Ethics
Kate Darling (@grok_) offers a talk to the Berkman Center that’s so popular, the talk needs to be moved from Berkman to Wasserstein Hall, where almost a hundred people come for lunch and her ideas on...
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Khalida Brohi: from Balochistan to MIT
The Media Lab’s conversation series today features Pakistani social entrepreneur Khalida Brohi, founder and executive director of the Sughar Empowerment Society. She’s a director’s fellow at the Media...
View ArticlePromise Tracker and Monitorial Citizenship
It’s not obvious from looking at me, but while I’m American, I’m deeply partisan towards the nation of Ghana. I moved to Accra, Ghana in 1993 to study xylophone music, and I’ve traveled back to the...
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