Colin Rhinesmith

The video above features a statement by Harvard Law School Professor and Co-Chair of this year’s Internet & Society Conference, Charles Ogletree in response to yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation.

This video is licensed by C-SPAN under a “liberalized copyright policy“. To watch the full video, including a statement by Sharon Brown, Attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, visit C-SPAN’s “Supreme Court” page and click on “Reaction to Supreme Court Ruling on School Integration (06/28/2007)” (requires RealPlayer).

Related stories:

BBC News, “US split over school race verdict”

NPR News, “Supreme Court Quashes School Desegregation”

New York Times, “Justices Limit the Use of Race in School Plans for Integration”

Washington Post, “Divided Court Limits Use of Race by School Districts“

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MediaBerkman has a new look. It’s a work-in-progress based on the Barthelme theme by Scott Allan Wallick. I hope to get the audio & video feed links back up soon. In the meantime, listen to danah boyd’s talk at the Berkman Center. Video coming soon.

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Photo by ericag, via Flickr (CC license)

Here’s the article in the Boston Globe about the move.

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My notes from today’s luncheon with danah boyd at the Berkman Center:

At the base of social network sites is the desperate desire to be social, to be apart of a group. Social networks are about friends and people you already know.

Danah said she’s trying to figure why people use these tools. Her background is in computer science and then came to MIT and started studying people. When she quit MIT she started paying attention to what was happening on the web, in 2003, she started following Friendster. She followed a ton of different sites as well. In 2004, she formalized research in order to a dissertation to follow what youth were doing (just in time for MySpace).

Ethnography is about writing culture, she says. To practice ethnographic method is living, breathing a culture. What is that culture when you are talking about technology? Her goal was to do a study of American youth. People thought she was insane.

Danah said she’s moved in between the offline and online worlds for her research with a ton of research on demographics. Since 2004, she’s done lots of things to hang out with youth/in youth spaces. And she’s talked to parents, teacher, etc. She reads, observes and documents.

The difficulty in studying youth culture is in the fact that it’s always changing. She’s at Berkman to talk about MySpace - the last 6-9 months the entire culture has shifted. There is an exodus going on from MySpace to FaceBook. Has more to do with class than anything else.

What’s going on with MySpace?

Pew did some great work in this space. 55% of american teenagers admitted that they shared their online profile with their parents. 70 to 80 percent have a profile, but they might not do more than IM. 50% are active, but there’s a lot more going on. She also interviews people who does not use it.

On Networked Publics (Mimi Ito)

Danah said she’s had a hard time locating it because locating public is difficult. There’s two parts:

1. A collection of space or location where things happen in public.

2. A group of people who share interest or value.

The concept of public: critical to engage in public to make things real (Arendt). Networked publics and what it means through mediated technologies? They are imagined by the public to have some kind of property.

Networked publics have existed for almost thirty years (see Usenet). People organizing around interests. Mailing lists - topic orientation. Then the boom happened. People rushed online, sold on story of e-commerce. Web 2.0 is really interested in the way that it changed the rules of organizing sociality.

(more…)

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I just learned that Danah Boyd will be visiting the Berkman Center next Tuesday for a Luncheon Series event. Here’s the blurb:

Guest: danah boyd
Topic: MyFriends, MySpace: American Youth Socialization on Social Network Sites

“Publics offer youth a space to engage in cultural identity development. By engaging in public life, youth learn to interpret the cultural signals that surround them and incorporate these cultural elements into their life. For a diverse array of reasons, contemporary youth have limited access to the types of publics with which most adults grew up. As a substitute for these inaccessible publics, networked publics like MySpace and Facebook are emerging to provide contemporary American youth with a necessary site for peer engagement. While networked publics provide space for various critical forms of sociality, the architecture of the sites that support networked publics is fundamentally different than the physical architecture that we take for granted in unmediated life. Persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences are all properties that today’s youth must face in their public expressions. Because of these properties, youth are being socialized into a public life that is quite different from what their parents experienced. In this talk, I will address what youth are doing on social network sites and why it matters.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communications.”

To sign up for Berkman Center newsletters, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/signup

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I’ve been working on a first pass at my directed study proposal for the fall. Here it is:

“Digital media, the Internet and copyright law present growing challenges to educators and academic institutions working to share access to teaching and learning resources inside and outside the classroom. But what is a classroom in the digital age? Where does the classroom begin and end when online learning materials become increasingly accessible through open, walled, and semi-walled gardens? This course will examine these and other questions, including:

• What is the mission of University?
• What are recommended Fair Use guidelines and best practices for educators and students in the digital age?
• What software platforms are being used and developed to encourage online sharing of educational materials while balancing the rights of copyright owners and concerns of academic institutions?

To investigate these issues, the course will be divided into three sections to further explore recent scholarship and innovative educational initiatives related to the topics above. The final project will result in a 25 page research paper. In conducting research for this study, the course will include a directed study blog incorporating del.icio.us links (and this wiki) to allow the instructor and the public at-large to participate in a collaborative learning environment.”

The wiki for the directed study is closed, but I will be setting up a blog which will be open for participation. More soon . . .

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The Hartford Courant published an op-ed with Kevin Howley (Media Studies professor at DePauw University and author of Community Media) yesterday titled, “Clocks Ticking on Net Neutrality“. I like his telephone analogy:

Think about it like this: When you make a phone call, the telephone company can’t keep you from talking to whomever you want, or prevent you from talking about whatever you like. Net neutrality applies the same operating principle to Internet communication.”

Read the rest of the article and help save the internet.

The Save The Internet blog’s got more on Howley’s article and about taking action on the FCC’s June 15 public comment deadline.

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I wrote up an edited transcript of David Weinberger’s new book talk for the iDC e-list, which I’ve also posted online. The full audio version is available for download over at MediaBerkman. I received an email from Michel Bauwens (p2p Foundation) who also informed me that the transcript is up in wiki form.

Buy the book and join the discussion.

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In “Verizon officials catch static over cable TV plan“, Globe staff reporter, Caroyln Johnson writes

Over and over, local officials appeared before the committee noting the current franchise process was working fine, with 49 Verizon cable franchises in place and 19 more pending. Critics voiced concerns that public, educational, and governmental access programming would suffer, that Verizon would be able to “cherry pick” wealthy neighborhoods in which to offer the service, and local governments would lose control of their rights of way under the proposed legislation.”

(Article requires free registration at Boston.com)

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