How does the changing use of social media affect politics? Today at the Media Lab, Helen Margetts of the Oxford Internet Institute joined us to talk about a new book with Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri, Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action. Ethan Zuckerman facilitated the […]
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What effects do laws and surveillance have on the exercise of freedoms online? Today, the Berkman Center welcomed Jon Penney (@jon_penney), who is finishing his D.Phil at the University of Oxford, to talk about his dissertation research on chilling effects. Jon is a lawyer, Oxford researcher, and a research fellow […]
How can we engineer open production at scale, and what can we learn from feminist critiques of technology that could help us achieve those goals? At the Berkman Center this Tuesday (video), Aaron Halfaker talked about the challenges of scaling large-scale cooperation, the values that motivate efforts to keep that […]
What role can field experiments and other causal research play in efforts toward social justice in social computing? Aren’t experiments tools for reductionistic, top-down paternalism? How could causal inference ever support grassroots approaches to social justice? This question is a central struggle in my effort to decide a dissertation topic. […]
The hardest part of being a PhD intern at the Social Media Collective last summer happened on weekday mornings. On those mornings, when I joined the optional Writing Power Hour, we would sit together at a long table overlooking the Charles River and write. For one or two hours, we […]