Colin Rhinesmith

On Monday, February 25 the Berkman Center for Internet & Society is hosting a one-day FCC Hearing on the future of broadband network management practices.

Panelists include a wide range of legal scholars, telecom executives and technical specialists including David L. Cohen, Executive Vice President of Comcast; Eric Klinker, Chief Technology Officer of BitTorrent; Marvin Ammori, General Counsel for Free Press; and Berkman Faculty Director Yochai Benkler.

The schedule for the day is online at the Berkman Center Events & Webcasts blog. Free Press has set-up a page with more information - including info on how the public can submit their own video-testimonies to the FCC during the event - at Save The Internet.com.

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I just finished reading Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential,” a book that my beautiful wife gave me for Christmas this year. She knows I’m a No Reservations nut. “Kitchen Confidential” made me a little nuttier, but definitely in a good way.

But this post is not about my inclination towards one chef and his show on the Travel Channel. Although, I’d probably like to write more about it. Instead, I thought I’d take a look back on this New Year’s eve at a few tidbits from 2007 before jumping head first into 2008.

2007 was an incredible year for me. I got married (most significantly), participated in a gathering with other educational podcasters at Apple HQ in Cupertino, CA, was invited to speak at Bentley College, built a virtual re-design of Boston City Hall Plaza, interviewed a visual artist in Second Life, participated in two conferences at Harvard and Columbia, helped rebuild a website, served on the Board of Directors for two amazing organizations, supported a really exciting research project funded by the NEH, learned a ton about the web and digital culture in grad school, produced a podcast about citizen media and the law, and had the good fortune to continue to work with and learn from some truly world class people at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, while attending grad school. I am very, very lucky.

Of course there was lots more geekery and fun (and not so much fun) along the way. Most notably, what I learned and continue to learn from the dedicated volunteers and community media workers struggling to remain relevant, and survive, in a changing media landscape. Particularly at a time when pressure from large cable and telephone companies = state legislation continues to beat down community media center after community media center slamming the door on opportunities for local voices and community concerns all across America to be seen and heard on cable television.

In 2008, this will become my world - even more than it already has been.

This week, I’m leaving my short, but life-changing, work experience at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, where I began as a Staff Assistant in 2005 to join the staff at Cambridge Community Television as Community Media Coordinator.

In 2005, while in my last semester at Emerson as an Continuing Ed student, I joined a dedicated group of student volunteers to shuttle (by foot) video tapes of Democracy Now! from CCTV to Boston Neighborhood Network, because BNN did not have a satellite dish to broadcast Amy Goodman and crew on cable access in Boston. The CCTV staff was incredibly generous in helping our effort to bring DN! to Boston, via their tape recordings of the show. Ever since, I’ve had a great admiration for CCTV and the people involved. Now, I’m joining the crew.

While it was a difficult decision to leave the Berkman Center and all the extraordinary people I’ve met there, I couldn’t be more excited to join this new, but familiar, community in Cambridge. I look forward to working with the staff, members, volunteers, the Board (which I previously served on) and other new friends I hope to make along the way. I also look forward to continuing the relationship that Harvard Law School Professor and Berkman Center Founder, Charles Nesson helped strengthen during my time there.

For all these experiences from 2007, I am grateful. For those yet to come in 2008, I couldn’t be more excited.

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I thought I’d use this post to share some of the work that I’m currently involved in. I find that these periodic updates also help me to get my head around it all, particularly as the semester winds down.

Grad School

This semester at Emerson College, I’m taking one class, I’m involved in a directed study and I’ve started my year-long thesis project. Here are some updates:

Hub2: As I’ve noted previously, I’m involved in a course at Emerson College that is exploring civic engagement through the design and social use of virtual platforms. Hub2 is the umbrella program, that currently involves students enrolled in a day class (that I’m in) and a night course. I’ve blogged a bunch about our group project in SL here and also on my blog at Emerson College. Soon, I’ll be starting a research paper around issues involved in the course

Fair Use, Media and Education in the Digital Age: This directed study seeks to learn more about the challenges facing educators and students in sharing online access to copyrighted material. So far, I’ve explored a number of philosophical, political, and legal issues related to this ongoing balancing act between copyright holders and educators. I’m currently structuring ideas for my research paper due at the end of this semester.

Community Media in Transition: While I’m very lucky that I enjoy all of my courses at Emerson, my grad thesis is perhaps the most exciting part of my work this semester. I’ve refined the topic a bit. I began a study recently that seeks to understand the role of the community media center for those involved in this form of local media practice. The purpose is to challenge the notion that the community media center (Public Access TV) is no longer necessary because of the Internet. I’m grateful to those in access who have contributed to my thinking on this topic.

Paid Research and Digital Media Production

The Digital Lyceum: Also at Emerson College this semester, I am supporting two faculty members for a NEH grant-funded project to research mixed-reality event production in the humanities. The Digital Lyceum, seeks to develop best practices and to propose a sustainable model for producing these with the purpose of contributing to humanities scholarship.

Citizen Media Law Podcast: We’re off and running with our new podcast at the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. I’ve had a lot of fun working on this project. We’re still experimenting with the format and look forward to seeing how it progresses.

Volunteer Service

Action Coalition for Media Education: The new ACME website launched this fall and we’ve been pushing our fundraiser at the site. There’s lots of activity there, including blogging from board members and others. I’m excited that we’ve been able to license our media education materials under a Creative Commons Attribution Nonommercial 3.0 Unported license.

Cambridge Community Television: I’ve been working with others in the Membership, Outreach and Advisory Committee on a report about our recent web survey of CCTV members. The survey was very successful and I thank everyone in the committee for their hard work.

For these reasons above, I haven’t had a lot of time to blog here. But, I look forward to being more active on this site as I head towards the home stretch in December. I’m also looking forward to my Television Culture and Communication Ethics and Diversity courses next semester, along with completing my grad thesis. A busy year and lots to be thankful for.

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Today, David Ardia, Sam Bayard and I launched the first Citizen Media Law Podcast. This new weekly podcast series, produced by the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, will cover a range of issues relating to the intersection of citizen media, journalism and the law.

Here’s more from the post:

This week, David Ardia responds to the federal shield bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives, Colin Rhinesmith talks about legal threats to co-bloggers, and Sam Bayard reflects on the Phoenix New Times arrests.

To subscribe to the podcast, visit the subscriptions page or go directly to the podcast feed.

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I’d like to welcome Mike Deehan, as the new Multimedia Production Coordinator, to the Berkman Center. Here’s a bit from my email to Mike and the Berkman community today:

Mike brings an exciting background in journalism and new media to the center, as Deputy Online Editor for the New England News Forum, a former intern at National Journal’s CongressDaily and Conference Technology Coordinator for the Media Giraffe Project in Amherst, MA.

Mike will be taking over as point person for media projects at Berkman, including webcasting, podcasting, video production, and other related efforts, as I move into my new role as a Producer for the Citizen Media Law Podcast, debuting later this week.

Please join me in welcoming Mike to Berkman!”

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The Internet & Society 2007 conference videos are now available for viewing on Democracy: Internet TV. They can also be watched on blip.tv.

We’re working on the mpeg2 files for University Channel so folks at Public Access TV centers and other channels can download them for broadcast.

For the complete conference audio and video archives, please visit the Media page at IS2K7.org.

All videos are licensed by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.

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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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