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In Praise of Peer to Peer Connectivity: Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci
Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist who uses, as well as studies, social media, offers a refreshingly rigorous and empirically-scaffolded perspective amid the frenzy of armchair social science regarding the impact of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and other participatory media. Too often, public discourse about the influence of social media, both positive and negative, devolves into a Manichaean rhetoric of utopia-or-apocalypse.… more
DML Conference 2013: Democratic Futures (Ethan Zuckerman, Keynote)
Ethan Zuckerman (@EthanZ) will deliver the keynote at this year's Digital Media & Learning Conference, "Democratic Futures," March 14-16 in Chicago, and we asked Howard Rheingold (@hrheingold) to vlog with Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and co-founder of Global Voices. As Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs and Net Smart, writes below: "Don’t miss the video. Zuckerman does most of the talking, and he knows what he’s talking about."… more
Community Innovation Lab: Mashups of Youth, Activists, Technologists, Policymakers
If you seek examples of civic engagement by young people, look no further than the Community Innovation Lab, a mashup of Harvard students and faculty, the city of Boston, and established neighborhood associations. The core of this town-gown-local government hybrid is a course jointly taught by Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Michael Hooper and Harvard Kennedy School professor Susan Crawford. The Lab is the activist portion of the course, which also includes weekly seminars taught separately by each professor.… more