While Googling for the Media Lab logo the other day, I came across several pages of results with the logos of other Media Labs. As everyone appends ‘Labs’ to the title of their organizations, a gold rush for laboratory beaker clip art has emerged. Here are 27 other scientific workshops of “media”, including a bonus logo of the now-defunct Media Lab Europe (think Euro Disney). Behold!
Holmes Wilson, internet activism, and why we need you
(originally posted on Civic MIT)
Fight For the Future is known for its massive viral organizing campaigns that changed Internet history both nationally and globally. Faced with the passage of Stop Online Piracy Act/SOPA and the Protect-IP Act/PIPA — legislation that would have jeopardized the open Internet as we know it — Fight for the Future organized the largest and most visible online protest in history. Holmes Wilson has also co-founded Miro, OpenCongress, and Amara. He’s been at the forefront of a range of open internet and participatory culture projects and campaigns.
The internet delivers newfound powers of expression
The key thing about the internet that drives Holmes’s passion for it is that it gives us a new power, which ultimately translates to freedom of expression. But not in the conventional sense. The freedom of expression the internet enables isn’t just about speaking. It’s about making art, starting a business, overthrowing a government, building a new government, realizing dreams, and the ability to give your greatest gift to the world. When we think about expression this way, it’d be unthinkable to fail in preserving this medium. It would stifle human potential.
But that power is inherently fragile
The internet is fragile. The power that is being given to people is not necessarily stable and there are significant threats to it. The most present threat of the recent year is SOPA/PIPA. In some ways, these seemed like very small reasonable changes to the law. There’s a law that says sites aren’t responsible for content that users generate and this would make site owners responsible for users’ content. The consequence would have been that any copyright holder could have taken down any site where their content appeared and any site that is built with user generated content would have to aggressively police user behavior and contribution. Most of the harm would have been invisible. If SOPA was in effect when YouTube was first invented, we wouldn’t have YouTube.
The Boston Marathon, Social Media, and the News
(cross-posted on Civic and PBS)
I met my baby niece yesterday, Sunday morning. She was born late Saturday night. I went to some news sites to grab some screenshots of the things that happened the day she was born, and stopped myself. There were some really bad things happening in the world, Saturday, and every day. Instead, I wrote down that the Red Sox beat the Rays, 2-1.
Today is Marathon Monday, Patriot’s Day, one of those wonderful Massachusets-only-and-why-do-they-get-an-extra-day-off days. My niece is home from the hospital, thank God. I had saved today, like most Bostonians, as a light at the end of the dark winter tunnel. The day I knew there’d be college cookouts and the largest crowd that assembles, anywhere, to watch distance runners go by. People work their asses off to qualify for Boston’s tough time limits. Others get into the race by raising large amounts of money for worthy charities. Runners of all speeds and shapes stream by wearing Team in Training and Dana Farber’s colors, in addition to an endless array of less formal causes, sick cousins and memoriams to those who have left us. The Red Sox are granted an exception by Major League Baseball to hold a home day game every year on this day, so that as the game finishes, another 40,000-strong may walk a couple of blocks and join the throngs already cheering on the waves of runners.
Today, we walked over to right near the finish line and cheered people in their last few blocks. We were impressed by how fresh everyone looked, how the crisp, sunny day had buoyed their spirits and helped them make running a marathon look easy. We tried to decide whether we should head to a bar at the finish line or out to Fenway. At the last minute we decided to hop on Hubway bikes, make use of the closed streets, and go over to watch the crowd pour out of Fenway.
After failing to navigate the Lansdowne Street crowds with bikes, we walked over to Kenmore Square, the 1-mile-left mark. We stood next to a jovial group of undergrad girls, who shouted out personal cheers based on whatever the runners had written on their shirts. We told the runners how good they looked, and to finish strong. And then the girl next to me said something about a bombing. “Where’d you see this? On the internet, or real news?”, I asked. We all whip out our smartphones and find the Globe and others reporting multiple explosions. No. Not here, too.
Encouraging Flexibility from Social Media Giants: How We Get Private Platforms to Support Public Speech
(originally posted on Civic MIT and PBS)
There are many problems with using commercial technology platforms to host democratic, social, or activist content and communications. These problems came up in multiple sessions at the National Conference on Media Reform last weekend. There are also obvious reasons to continue using these platforms (audience reach, most notably), and so we do. Some activist efforts that silo communications on more open, but relatively unknown platforms strike me as irresponsible, if the goal is to reach as many people as possible (but this is a fine line). The more I think about this issue, though, the more I see potential solutions and a future in working with the platform providers to build some degree of flexibility into their products and policies.
The spot on the carpet reserved for public ranting at #NCMR13
Social media giants do not have immediately obvious incentive to participate in such compromise. First of all, supporting individual humans doesn’t scale at anywhere near the order of magnitude they seek with their software. This model of customer support is perhaps best illustrated by Google, where serious and eminently solvable problems are routed through static FAQ pages, or, if you’re lucky, a forum page where a Google developer or superuser might stumble across your concern and provide some hint of illumination as to its origin or any hope of forthcoming resolution.
81 Ways Humanitarian Aid has Become Participatory
My Media Lab Master’s thesis argues that information and communication technologies, and particularly the web, have expanded the range of ways the public can help in times of crisis, even (or especially) if we’re nowhere near said crisis. Or, to be more formal about it, participatory aid is mutual, peer-to-peer aid mediated or powered by information and communication technology. We’re building a platform to help coordinate participatory aid projects, but first, I wanted to share some examples.
Table of Contents:
Context
A Framework for Considering Participatory Aid
Ways to help:
I. Help Prepare Before Crisis Occurs
II. Build technical platforms to facilitate peer-to-peer aid
III. Use Tech to Identify Crises
IV. Improve Situational Awareness of Aid Decisionmakers and Affected Populations
V. Crowd Cognition and Creativity
VI. Aid with technology expertise itself
VII. Improved Donation-making
VIII. Pro Bono Skills Donation
IX. Donate the Gift of Attention
X. Donate physical goods in new ways
XI. Help meet social and cultural needs
Context
The collective response to a far-away crisis in the 20th century went something like this:
- Find out about a crisis happening far away (if it’s in the news)
- Want to do something to help (if you’re so motivated by the particular crisis, affected community, or other factors)
- Realize that the only things you can do to help are:
- Travel to the crisis location (which aid groups usually hate, because it means they now have to feed and shelter YOU, too)
- Send food or supplies to the crisis location (which aid groups usually hate, because then they need to figure out how to distribute this stuff, or worse, warehouse it like the Ark in Indiana Jones)
- Send money to aid groups (which aid groups are usually OK with, because they can figure out how to appropriately allocate this liquid asset)
As a result, one can imagine that citizens watching an endless parade of crises on the nightly news might eventually develop disaster fatigue, or develop the widespread belief that all of the news is negative (AP – A New Model for News).
But today, our radical connectivity lets us do things in new ways, and often without waiting for permission. The formal aid sector, for so many years the conduit between donors and victims, is facing tech-driven disintermediation not unlike the disruptive trends already experienced by the music, travel, and news industries. Technology increasingly allows us to provide this new form of aid directly to the community in need, or as part of newly emerging digital-volunteer-powered organizations, rather than routing everything through a few major aid groups. There are pros and cons to this development, as with anything. I’ll get into those in greater depth in my actual thesis. But the point of this post is to illustrate the range of ways we can help, and get your feedback on the model I’ve abstracted from the following examples.
When we really care about a community in crisis, there’s a lot more we can do than give money to an aid organization. I’m not arguing that everyone will be so motivated every time. That’s not how most of us work. But when that motivation is there, when it’s our friends’ community at stake, or our heartstrings have been sufficiently tugged by a powerful story, the range of activities we CAN do from far away is much greater and richer than it has ever been before.
Organizing the Internet to Protect the Open Internet #NCMR13
Josh Levy, Internet Campaign Director at Free Press, introduces the topic. The SOPA protest was the biggest online protest we’ve seen. Millions of people participated and made a real impact. For organizers who have been fighting on open internet issues, it was exciting to see so many people take action and recognize that the internet is something you have to proactively protect, or else the openess that you know and love and maybe didn’t think about before could go away.
An alphabet soup of bills and meetings have followed in SOPA’s wake (CISPA, ECPA, CFAA, WCIT and FISA). We’ve had to learn what they mean and figure out how to leverage this newly engaged network to beat back the bad bills and support the good bills and educate the public on why the open internet is so important.
Panelists:
- Josh Levy Mark Stanley, Center for Media and Technology
- Elizabeth Stark, open internet agitator
- Tim Hwang, who’s worked on Mozilla’s advocacy around the ITU, started ROFLCON, a celebration of web culture, and the Awesome Foundation
- Holmes Wilson, cofounder of Fight for the Future
Holmes was encouraged by the fact that everyone, from individuals to companies to organizations, did something, from changing Twitter avatars to website shutdowns. Within a few days, it was apparent that the bills were to be shelved, and the event had put a crater in the years-long lobbying push by the studios. It reset the rules for how Congress and policymakers around the world treat the internet.
So who led this response?
What I’m Working On
- Media Lab Master’s thesis on participatory aid (how we can use the internet to do more to help in times of crisis)
- LazyTruth - extending the product, adding verified content, building out a metrics dashboard, and conducting political science research
- TAing News & Participatory News course at MIT
- the on1on
- Speaking at upcoming conferences, Digital Media and Learning and National Conference on Media Reform
- Finding a job again this summer
