Two important reads on Invisible Children and the #Kony2012 campaign: Gilad Lotan of SocialFlow has been crunching the data on the spread of Kony2012 on Twitter and has some very interesting preliminary results. (He’s also been at SXSW this past week, so this is an impressive effort, as he’s been doing analysis while appearing on [...]
David Weinbergers new book Too Big To Know (#2B2K be sure to pick book titles that make good hash tags) launched last night at Harvard Law School with a talk entitled Unsettling Knowledge. If you know David’s work, it’s obvious that the title is a pun. And David’s new book is a wonderfully unsettling [...]
I’ve been working with friend (and boss) Joi Ito to help the Media Lab put up a statement about our collective opposition to SOPA and PIPA. Joi and I are both posting this piece on our personal blogs, and a shorter piece from the Media Lab site leads to both these posts. As we get [...]
Wael Abbas himself to the crowd at Microsoft’s Social Media Symposium saying, I’m just a blogger. Yeah, and Shirky’s just some bald dude. Here’s my attempt to transcribe Wael’s talk. I want to talk about social media in Egypt from 2004 through the revolution and why we needed to use social media. In our country [...]
On January 1st, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonthan put into place a reform that he and key ministers have been discussing for years: he ended a 20-year old subsidy that kept Nigeria’s petrol prices the lowest on the continent. When Nigerians went back to work on Monday, the 2nd, they discovered that not only had petrol [...]
Center for Civic Media meetings start with an icebreaker question: you introduce yourself, and tell us whether you prefer pirates or ninjas, homemade or canned cranberry sauce. You offer your favorite protest chant or tell us what percent (I am the 99%) you identify with. Yesterday, on seeing two of Civic’s finest dressed in argyle, [...]
Somedays it seems that everyone has joined Twitter. And then a new account comes along and raises interesting questions about what the service is for and how it should be used. Welcome to Twitter, Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen Press Office, now tweeting at @HSMPress. Al-Shabaab is the militant organization waging war against the Transitional Federal [...]
Today is International Volunteer Day, a celebration of the millions of people around the world who give their time, energy and wisdom to projects and causes they care about. Volunteers feed the hungry, care for the sick, comfort the grieving. We live in a world where companies and governments are responsible for producing most of [...]
This afternoon, MIT’s Political Science distinguished speakers series hosts Regina Dugan and Kaigham Gabriel, director and deputy director of DARPA, the US defense advanced research project agency, who are here to speak about advanced manufacturing in America. The title for their talk is Just Make It, a response Dugan offers to people who ask her [...]
Award-winning Nigerian filmmaker Zik Zulu Okafor is one of the first speakers at today’s New Media Nollywood Conference at Georgia Tech. In conjunction with this academic gathering, Okafor is shooting a new Nollywood film at Georgia Tech this month, taking advantage of access to the campus to tell the story of a Nigerian student in [...]
Ian Condry offers an extended introduction to Mimi Ito’s work because her plane has been delayed and it’s likely to be another half hour before she joins us at the MIT Media Lab. Her topic is Fandom unbound: Otaku culture in a connected age. Otaku is a term that refers to a specific type of [...]
Dear Chris, June, Bruno One of my students at the Center for Civic Media and I were discussing the need for more conference venues for young speakers to share their ideas and polish their presentation skills. While TEDx has greatly expanded speaking opportunities, we felt that there was still more room to experiment with [...]
This summer, Sasha, Lorrie and I started brainstorming the sorts of events we wanted to host at the Center for Civic Media this fall. The first I put on the calendar was a session on mapping civic media, a chance to catch up with some of my favorite people who are working to study, understand [...]
There’s a great blogpost from Nancy Scola about the rise of Twitter hashtags as form of political discourse, specifically focusing on the #WeCantWait tag, which both quotes President Obama about the need for rapid action on a jobs bill, and invites snarky commentary on both sides of the political aisle about what Americans can’t wait [...]
Beth Coleman presents some of her recent research on the protests in Tahrir square, and a broader theory of how social networks and activism in the physical world work together today at the Berkman Center. With her is Mike Ananny, her coauthor and researcher in danah boyd’s lab at Microsoft Research. The presentation, Tweeting the [...]