Radio Berkman
139 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 5 years ago - ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsStories from the Deep Internet
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A spotlight on Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow Jonathan Jackson
January 11, 2019 20:34 - 23 minutes - 32.1 MBJonathan Jackson is a co-founder of Blavity Inc., a technology and media company for black millennials. Blavity’s mission is to "economically and creatively support Black millennials across the African diaspora, so they can pursue the work they love, and change the world in the process." Blavity has grown immensely since their founding in 2014 — among other things, spawning five unique sites, reaching over 7 million visitors a month, and organizing a number of technology, activism, and entrep...
A spotlight on 2018 Berkman Klein Fellow Amy Zhang
December 07, 2018 20:21 - 18 minutes - 17.1 MBBerkman Klein Center interns sat down with 2018 Berkman Klein Center Fellow Amy Zhang, to discuss her work on combating online harassment and misinformation as well as her research as a Fellow.
How Youth Are Reinventing Instagram and Why Having Multiple Accounts Is Trending
November 02, 2018 15:41 - 13 minutes - 11.9 MBAccording to a recent Pew Research Center study, Instagram is the second most popular platform among 13 to 17-year-olds in the US, after YouTube. Nearly 72 percent of US teenagers are on the image sharing platform. Our Youth & Media team looked at how teens are using Instagram to figure out who they are. While seemingly just a photo-sharing platform, users have molded Instagram into a more complex social media environment, with dynamics and a shared internal language almost as complex as a t...
When a Bot is the Judge
November 29, 2017 20:21 - 32 minutes - 44.9 MBWe encounter algorithms all the time. There are algorithms that can guess within a fraction of a percentage point whether you’ll like a certain movie on Netflix, a post on Facebook, or a link in a Google search. But Risk Assessment Tools now being adopted by criminal justice systems all across the country - from Arizona, to Kentucky, to Pennsylvania, to New Jersey - are made to guess whether you’re likely to flee the jurisdiction of your trial, or commit a crime again if you are released. W...
Fake News & How To Stop It
December 15, 2016 21:29 - 26 minutes - 21.2 MBEven before Election Day, 2016, observers of technology & journalism were delivering warnings about the spread of fake news. Headlines like “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump For President” and “Donald Trump Protestor Speaks Out, Was Paid $3500 To Protest” would pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, and spread like wildfire. Both of those headlines, and hundreds more like them, racked up millions of views and shares on social networks, gaining enough traction to earn mentions in t...
The Chilling Effect
May 18, 2016 18:21 - 11 minutes - 10.5 MBThe effects of surveillance on human behavior have long been discussed and documented in the real world. That nervous feeling you get when you notice a police officer or a security camera? The one that forces you to straighten up and be on your best behavior, even if you're doing nothing wrong? It's quite common. The sense of being monitored can cause you to quit engaging in activities that are perfectly legal, even desirable, too. It's a kind of "chilling effect." And it turns out it even h...
Star Wars vs Copyright
May 02, 2016 19:48 - 12 minutes - 11.6 MB"George Lucas built a whole new industry with Star Wars." says Peter S. Menell, devoted science fiction fan and a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law, who studies copyright and intellectual property law. "But what funds that remarkable company is their ways of using copyright." And he's right. A third of the profits LucasFilm pulls in from Star Wars has come from merchandising alone (http://www.forbes.com/sites/aswathdamodaran/2016/01/06/intergalactic-finance-how-much-is-the-star-wars...
The Rise and Tumble of the Tumblr Teen
March 10, 2016 16:45 - 15 minutes - 13.9 MBIn her article "The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens," Elspeth Reeve tells the stories of some of Tumblr's most popular bloggers -kids who started their blogs in high school, made a ton of money and then inexplicably disappeared. In this episode we talk to Reeve about what she discovered when she went looking for these teens and what that can tell you about Tumblr and the teenage child stars of the Internet. Read Reeve's article here: https://newrepublic.com/article/129002/secret-lives-tumblr...
How Fair Use Works, in Six Minutes or Less
February 25, 2016 18:05 - 6 minutes - 7.65 MBAn artist, musician, or writer can’t just take another person's creation and claim it as their own. Federal law outlines how creators can and can’t borrow from each other. These rules are collectively called "copyright law," and essentially they give creators the exclusive right to copy, modify, distribute, perform, and display their creative works. Copyright law was originally created as an incentive. If creators aren’t worrying about whether someone might steal their work, they’re more li...
Digital Alter Egos
February 08, 2016 19:38 - 53.4 MBAre you really "you" online? We asked around for stories of digital alter egos — secret identities that people maintain on the web and try to keep separate from their real life identities. And it turns out there are lots of reasons — some good, some nefarious, some maybe both — to have an alternate persona online. On this episode we share stories of Catfishers, sock puppets, and digital doppelgangers. Reference Section Photo courtesy of carbonnyc Music courtesy of Podington Bear, MCJackin...
Technology on Trial
November 20, 2015 16:57 - 16 MBYou've likely heard of Silk Road - the black market e-commerce hub that was shutdown in 2013 for becoming a magnet for vendors of illicit goods. But the story of its shutdown, and the investigation and trial that followed, is complicated enough that we need a guide. On this week's podcast Berkman Affiliate Hasit Shah brought together members of the Berkman community to speak with journalist and legal expert Sarah Jeong about what it was like to follow the Silk Road trial, and how the justice...
Digital Trash
November 06, 2015 20:57 - 17.9 MBOn your computer, you don’t ever really "take out the trash." Data doesn’t get picked up by a garbage truck. It doesn’t decompose in a landfill. It just accumulates. And because space is becoming less and less of an issue -- hard drive space keeps getting cheaper, and a lot of the apps we use have cloud storage anyway -- deleting our files is a thing of the past. We become Digital Hoarders. But what happens when we dig up those old files from years ago? Those old emails from our boyfriend...
What We Choose to Censor
October 30, 2015 14:47 - 13 MBFacebook has had a lot of trouble with misogynistic speech. A few years ago, several women’s groups joined together to petition Facebook to work harder to block misogynistic pages, posts, and replies. At the time Facebook had strict standards against hate speech that was racist or anti-semitic — such speech would be blocked or taken down. These groups simply asked that gendered hate speech receive the same treatment. It was ironic, people said, that Facebook would commonly take down photos o...
The Ad Block Wars
October 22, 2015 12:45 - 20.5 MBA recent New York Times survey of the top 50 news sites showed that blocking ads while surfing their mobile news sites could save up to 14 megabytes per page loaded. 14 megabytes adds up to 30 seconds over 4G, and, if you’re on a restricted data plan, it would cost you 30 cents per page, all of that money going to your mobile provider, not to the content publisher. But for content publishers, and the ad providers that keep them alive, ad blocking poses a huge problem. Most of the commercial ...
Cynthia Rudin on The Next Generation of Search Engines
September 22, 2015 18:46 - 60.6 MBThe current generation of search engines just tells you where to find information (returns a list of webpages). The next generation of search engines could anticipate what you are searching for, and actually find the information for you. In this conversation, Cynthia Rudin — associate professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Prediction Analysis Lab — leads a brainstorming session to envision the future of the search engine. Challenges for the ...
Towards a More Inclusive Web
September 03, 2015 03:07 - 18.9 MBEthnographer Whitney Phillips embedded with the trolls of 4chan, observing for years how anonymous members of its subversive "b" forum memed, pranked, harassed, and abused, all for the "lolz" — the thrill of doing something shocking. The result: a book, "This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture," that sheds light on how and why trolls do what they do. More than pushing the boundaries of taste within themselves — the "b" b...
How Block Chain Will Change the World
August 13, 2015 16:24 - 9.52 MBBitcoin is having its 7th birthday, and its promise to change the way the world thinks about money is looking less and less hyperbolic. For one, the block chain technology underlying Bitcoin - the public ledger that makes the exchange transparent and accountable - is now being used to clean up Wall Street. A block chain-inspired service announced recently could open up the practice of lending stocks, and help prevent the kind of out-of-control short selling that led to the crash of 2008. Bu...
Interview with musician and Berkman 2015-2016 fellow Damon Krukowski
August 05, 2015 20:32 - 10.8 MBOur full interview with Damon Krukowski referenced in this episode: https://soundcloud.com/radioberkman/pay-the-musician
Pay the Musician
August 05, 2015 20:21 - 13.4 MBThe market for recorded music has undergone at least three major reinventions since the dawn of the Internet. At the turn of the century illegal downloading ate away at the music industry’s bottom line. Then the iTunes music store made it easy to buy music again, albeit disaggregated from its album form. Then along came streaming. The combination of ubiquitous Internet connectivity and bottomless consumer appetite for music has led to the success of applications like Pandora, Spotify, and Rd...
Can you copyright a joke?
July 31, 2015 20:32 - 15.6 MBWith 316 million users posting 500 million tweets a day, someone is bound to write an unoriginal tweet now and then. But there are some Twitter users whose entire existence relies completely on plagiarizing tiny jokes and relatable observations created by other Twitter users. Many plagiarizing accounts have follower numbers ranging from the thousands to the millions. Meaning their exposure can lead to career opportunities and sponsorships built on the creativity of others who are just gettin...
Reddit: Community? Or Business?
July 27, 2015 16:14 - 19.5 MBReddit is sometimes called "the frontpage of the Internet." 170 million people a month help upload, curate, and make viral the cat photos, prank videos, and topical discussions that help fuel our neverending thirst for content. But recent moves by Reddit management to tighten up their content policy have threatened what is seen as the fundamentally "free speech" culture at Reddit. David Weinberger and Adrienne Debigare recently wrote about Reddit's crossroads for the Harvard Business Review...
Fiber City
July 15, 2015 15:32 - 9.62 MBWhy are over 450 towns in the US building their own high speed Internet networks? Let's look at the example of the small town of Holyoke, Massachusetts. A few years back the town's mayor asked if the local cable or telephone companies wanted to build a fiber network to serve local schools and municipal buildings. The companies declined. The project was turned over to the local gas and electric utility, HG&E. Eighteen years later, HG&E have expanded this network to serve local businesses, an...
Going Public
July 09, 2015 15:33 - 15.1 MBPublic spaces function based on a varying give-and-take relationship with community members. Publicly supported media -- whether it be college radio, a local NPR station, cable access, or PBS -- shares the word "public," but traditionally doesn’t have the same relationship with members as other "public" institutions, for examples parks and libraries. On this episode of Radio Berkman we speak with Nieman Fellow Melody Kramer who is researching what it means to be a member of a public or commu...
How to Stop Traffic
July 01, 2015 18:35 - 19.2 MBThe International Labour Organization estimates that between forced labor and the commercial sex trade, more than 20 million men, women, and children are being trafficked internationally. The web plays a huge role in keeping trafficking industries viable, but new technology is also contributing to the efforts to police and prevent human trafficking and the child exploitation that results from it. As a PhD student in MIT’s HASTS program, Mitali Thakor is studying the problems associated wit...
Trusting the Platform
June 25, 2015 15:39 - 20.6 MBThe more comfortable we get using digital platforms the more important it becomes to understand our relationships to them. From Facebook, to Fitbit, to Wikipedia, to networked games, and even to our schools and employers, the more we entrust our data to an outside platform, the more we have to ask the question: "How are they accountable to us?" For this week's podcast we spoke to four PhD candidates who are working with Microsoft Research. First, Ifeoma Ajunwa explains the tricky employers u...
Whose App Is It Anyway?
June 17, 2015 14:31 - 8.8 MBYou may be familiar with a typical hack-day or hack-a-thon. Throw a group of developers and creators in a conference room for the weekend, and they'll come up with some amazing app or product to make life better for all of humankind. Radio Berkman recently stumbled on a hack-a-thon that turns hack-a-thons on their head. Last year a traveling event called Comedy Hack Day visited the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Run by a group called Cultivated Wit, the goal of the hack day is to...
The Threats and Tradeoffs of Big Data
June 08, 2015 15:39 - 23.6 MBA lot of personal information about you is completely invisible, intangible, and racing around cyberspace on a mission to pay your bills and geolocate your Facebook status. And, of course, this is useful and in a lot of ways really cool. But today on Radio Berkman we’re going to talk about the obstacles presented by a data-driven society. How can we keep mountains of information out of the wrong hands without compromising all the great benefits we get everyday? First, we talk to Bruce Schne...
RB 217: Don't Hate the Player, Change the Game
June 01, 2015 15:41 - 18.6 MBFew sectors of the networked environment get a worse reputation for hate speech than online gaming. Competitive games with chat functions have always involved some level of trash talking. Slurs, shaming, and casual threats are part of the players' toolkit for riling up their opponent. But the toxicity levels of video game forums have reached a dangerous point. Unregulated and unchecked, many gaming networks have become zones where cyberbullying, misogyny, racism, and homophobic language are ...
RB216: The Internet — A Yearbook
March 24, 2015 19:54 - 47.2 MBIn Radio Berkman 216 we tackle the web as we know it in 2014-2015. Hate speech online, freedom of speech online, censorship and surveillance online, and, of course, whether our smart machines are out to destroy us. All of these stories and more are part of this year's Internet Monitor report (https://thenetmonitor.org/research/2014), a collection of dozens of essays that track how we are changing the web and how the web is changing us. This episode's guests include: • Andy Sellars, author o...
RB 215: Prometheus and the Dolphins
February 02, 2015 22:07 - 22 MBNot long ago, illegally downloading a movie could land you in court facing millions of dollars in fines and jailtime. But Hollywood has begun to weather the storm by offering alternatives to piracy — same day digital releases, better streaming, higher quality in-theater experiences — that help meet some of the consumer demand that piracy captured. But the porn industry is not Hollywood. While the web has created incredible new economic opportunities for adult entertainers — independent produc...
RB 214: CopyrightXXX
December 09, 2014 20:11 - 19 MBNot long ago, illegally downloading a movie could land you in court facing millions of dollars in fines and jailtime. But Hollywood has begun to weather the storm by offering alternatives to piracy — same day digital releases, better streaming, higher quality in-theater experiences — that help meet some of the consumer demand that piracy captured. But the porn industry is not Hollywood. While the web has created incredible new economic opportunities for adult entertainers — independent produc...
RB213: The Public Spectrum
May 01, 2014 21:37 - 15.3 MBMost of the spectrum of frequency that exists in the US is occupied or owned by large wireless corporations, cable companies, by the government. But at least one small chunk of spectrum — “low-band spectrum” wireless, or TV white spaces (so-called because it is the space between the television dials) — has been somewhat open to the public. There are thousands of devices on the market that take advantage of this spectrum without paying a license fee, allowing consumers to transmit bits without...
RB 212: Richard Price on Academia.edu
September 17, 2013 14:14 - 22 MBIn January of 2012 a British mathematician posted a humble invitation on his blog for fellow academics and researchers to join him in boycotting the prestigious research publisher Elsevier. Citing high prices, exploitative bundling practices, and lobbying efforts to prevent open access to research, the mathematician publicly denounced Elsevier and refused to do business with them in the future. Eighteen months later almost 14,000 researchers have joined the boycott of Elsevier, kicking off wh...
RB211: Bruce Schneier on Surveillance and Security
July 25, 2013 16:41 - 16.9 MBRevelations of the NSA’s data surveillance efforts have raised serious questions about the ethics and necessity of violating privacy that have been bubbling under the surface for some time. Efforts to monitor communication are nothing new, but electronically mediated communication has increased the amount of information being shared, and the possibilities for eavesdropping are endless. But there’s a trade off. People tolerate incursions into privacy for greater security or even convenience: h...
RB210: The New Knowledge Worker
March 14, 2013 17:38 - 10.9 MBAs high school and college students transition into a knowledge economy they face both advantages and challenges with how they find information and engage with co-workers as teammates. As a recent study of US employers and recent college graduates discovered, some young hires are pretty good at finding out information online and through social networks, but experience significant difficulty with traditional methods of finding answers — going through bound reports, picking up the phone, or res...
RB209: Crisis Spotting (Drone Humanitarianism II)
November 08, 2012 21:35 - 7.05 MBWhat if you could witness a crime taking place from space, and even step in to prevent it? A group of researchers at Harvard’s Humanitarian Initiative are trying to do exactly that. As the nation of Sudan faced a complex crisis — a secession of the southern region that threatened to boil over into a civil war in 2011 — Nathaniel Raymond and his team at The Signal Program were carefully monitoring the conflict. Their methods were uncommon. Using donated satellite imagery — the kind normally us...
RB208: The NetRoots
November 02, 2012 20:26 - 13.4 MBHow have politically engaged organizations used the web to fundamentally change how people organize and engage politically? Why are left wing organizations more likely to succeed in organization online? Why are conservatives less funny than liberals? David Karpf chronicles the dozens of Netroots political organizations, both progressive and conservative, that have sprouted up with the mass adoption of the internet in his new book The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Po...
RB207: Hacking Censorship (Drone Humanitarianism I)
October 04, 2012 16:16 - 8.6 MBThe Internet exists and persists on the border between helpful and harmful, between freedom and totalitarianism, access to knowledge and censorship. But as long as technology is adaptable activists will be learning and creating workarounds to spread information and promote change. Enter the Circumvention Tools Hackfest, a four-day bonanza of coders and freedom lovers gathered together to build and improve applications to help activists in repressive regimes get around censorship and surveilla...
RB 206: Unlocking Research
August 16, 2012 21:35 - 12.9 MBDisseminating knowledge was once a costly undertaking. The expenses of printing, distributing, and housing the work of researchers and scholars left most research in the hands of publishers, journals, and institutions in a system that has evolved over centuries. And the licensing model that has arisen with that system butts heads with the quick, simple, and virtually free distribution system of the net. The key to breaking free of the traditional licensing model locking up research is the pro...
RB205: Remembering Elinor Ostrom
July 09, 2012 18:52 - 4.05 MBNobel Laureate and Economist Elinor Ostrom passed away last month at the age of 78. Best recognized for her research into the management of common pool resources, Ostrom broke new ground with her findings that Commons were not inherently tragic, as previous generations of economists believed. In fact, Ostrom found examples of communities that could effectively manage limited resources, like agricultural land or open space, to prevent resource depletion. Her work paved the way for researchers ...
RB204: The Art and Science of Working Together
June 14, 2012 19:56 - 9.83 MBIf you’ve ever experienced the problem of a dead cell phone battery and only incompatible chargers within reach, you’ve experienced one of the minor frustrations of a non-interoperable system. This frustration — not to mention the environmental waste of having dozens of different charger types for the same class of device — has led some countries to institute regulations for cell phone manufacturers to use a single common standard. Such a structure is an example of an Interoperable System. An...
RB203: From Digital Uprising to Digital Society
June 01, 2012 20:11 - 13.3 MBLots of digital ink has been spilled about how and whether digital technology played a critical role in bringing about the Arab Spring. But it’s been 18 months since the spark of revolution was first lit in Tunisia, way back in December of 2010. How has digital technology played a role in laying the foundation for a stable Tunisia? Today’s guests were tasked with finding an answer to that question. And it turns out to be a very complex and interesting one, leading them to explore Tunisia’s co...
RB 188: SOPA on the Ropes(?)
May 21, 2012 22:44 - 12.9 MBThe Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — a U.S. House bill that would give the Department of Justice the authority to demand that ISPs block sites accused of hosting pirated content — seemed to be doing well. Nearly half of the Senate sponsored similar legislation that survived a committee vote. And people weren’t generally making a big deal about it. But on the week before Thanksgiving SOPA suddenly hit the front page after a particularly fraught House committee hearing on the bill. Battle lines ...
RB 187: Facing the Music
May 21, 2012 22:44 - 7.96 MB2011 has been a big year for quintuple threat actor/writer/comedian/rapper Donald Glover. For the last decade he released rap, remixes, and mixtapes on the web completely for free under the names Childish Gambino and MC DJ. Not just free of charge, but free of any kind of copyright notice or license. But over the summer Glover, now picking up notice for his smart rhymes, instrumentally organic sound, and indie sensibility, got signed to Glassnote records, home to big indie acts like Mumford a...
RB 186: World of Lawcraft
May 21, 2012 22:44 - 13.1 MBVideo games aren’t just, well, fun and games. When you pop open a video game — be it Farmville on Facebook for your smartphone or World of Warcraft on your $10,000 immersive gaming setup — you are entering into any number of different terms and conditions agreements about behavior and property that govern your playtime. But questions have started to arise as more and more games build the concept of virtual property into their play. New powers, levels, avatars, privileges — who do those things...
RB 185: The Next Generation Library
May 21, 2012 22:43 - 6.8 MBWhat would a digital version of your public library look like? There’s more to it than e-books and digital reading devices. Librarians, scholars, innovators, and techno-wizards are collaborating under the mantle of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to build a next generation public library. Such a thing could incorporate one or more of many different elements: a set of physical buildings; a purely digital archive with an open API layer for coders to play around with; a full fledged...
RB 184: Intellectual Property — Not Just For Lawyers Anymore
May 21, 2012 22:42 - 7.34 MBIt’s time to stop thinking about intellectual property as something purely for your legal counsel to deal with. That’s the driving idea behind John Palfrey’s aptly titled new book Intellectual Property Strategy. Companies and institutions that have to worry about creative works, trademarks, or brands would be well-suited, Palfrey says, to seize the sword and shield from the attorneys (who tend to be aggressive and/or defensive about IP) and exercise a little more flexibility and creativity wi...
RB 183: The Cooperation
May 21, 2012 22:42 - 9.99 MBAre human beings — as consultants, researchers, and the authors of business books have thought for years — fundamentally motivated by self interest? Or is there a deeper cooperative instinct that drives us to work? Those are the questions that fuel Yochai Benkler‘s investigation in The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest. In it Benkler challenges the rather embarrassing idea that people are primarily selfish by citing examples — from collective farming to ne...
Radio Berkman 182: Fear of a Networked Fourth Estate
May 21, 2012 22:42 - 13.5 MB“Wikileaks” has become something of a neverending story. Coverage has branched out beyond the revelations of the documents allegedly leaked by Pfc. Bradley Manning in 2010, and on to ancillary territory: the flamboyant presence of founder Julian Assange; the legal propriety of Wikileaks’ actions; and the harsh treatment of Manning as a military detainee. These last two areas have garnered the attention of today’s guest. Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler recently co-authored a joint letter ...
Radio Berkman 181: The Management (Rethinking Music VII)
May 21, 2012 22:41 - 8.95 MBIn our last episode we talked about how artists can feel besieged from all sides. Fans, promoters, labels — when you’re talented and famous everyone wants a piece of you. Today’s guest is one of the most important people in a musician’s life. He’s the guy that keeps the vultures at bay, and makes sure the artists can focus on their music. He is The Manager. Michael McDonald is the founder of the boutique artist management company Mick Management, home to artists like Brett Dennen and Ray LaMo...