This morning, a few of us are talking about Born Digital and related issues on WFPL, public radio in Louisville, KY. It’s a great show, called State of Affairs. They’ve even made a video, hosted on Blip.TV, about how young people use the technologies.
For a glimpse into the technology world in Louisville, check out Michelle Jones‘ Consuming Louisville. It’s a fun and interesting site, and Michelle’s one of the guests on State of Affairs.
Update: the archived show is here.
Our good friends at Public Radio Exchange, led by their executive director and Berkman fellow Jake Shapiro, have been awarded a huge honor from the MacArthur Foundation. PRX is one of a handful of 2008 “Creative and Effective Institutions.” I can think of no more deserving institution than PRX. Bravo!
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, one of Boston’s cultural gems, has released the first-of-its-kind museum concert series podcast, called The Concert. The good people there — including Catherine and Charlotte, who did a TV spot this morning — have decided to use a Creative Commons Share Music license. They’ve had the pro bono assistance of the Berkman clinical program in putting together this release. We’re proud to be associated with their innovative work to bring their music series to many more people than those who can attend in person at the appointed hour (though they highly encourage people to come to the Gardner to hear the concerts all the same!).
Bostonist and Cory at Boing Boing have more.
Charlie Nesson and his daughter Rebecca Nesson are hosting the Tuesday lunchtime session at the Berkman Center today.
– One first is that this is the first video webcast lunch event. We’ve regularly webcast these lunches audio-only. This week, with the help of Indigo Tabor, we are offering a live feed with video as well as audio. (The real-time webcast is 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. EDT today, Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2006.) So, too, is it being offered in Second Life, where 24 people are tuning in at the moment from Berkman Island, we’re told.
– The other first (actually, I’m certain there are more than two, since Becca and Charlie are involved) is that the class that they are talking about, Cyberone: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, is being taught IN Second Life, a first for Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School, anyway. If you haven’t seen the promo video for it yet, it’s a must.
It remains to be seen if these firsts will stick. It remains to be seen if these firsts will lead to other good things, as the establishment of Creative Commons by Prof. Lessig or the first podcast series hosted here by a combination of Dave Winer, Chris Lydon, and Bob Doyle. But it’s fun to be sure. Charlie and Becca keep the Berkman Center young and just a bit hip, and the likes of Rodica, Dean, Gene, and John Lester from Linden Labs keep giving things like these experiments life.
(John Bracken called this first first, way before me, and added more about a Berkeley example.)
I am one of the many who have benefitted from learning about Microsoft through the work of Robert Scoble, who has announced that he’s moving on to his next gig. I will miss his take on things from Redmond, and/but look forward to listening to his clear, resonant voice from another perch, at PodTech. Microsoft, indeed, was “lucky to have” him. Good luck, Scoble! Keep writing and, no doubt, podcasting.
The process of experiencing news of those Born Digital – the Digital Natives — is famously different from the generations they succeed. DNs don’t read the New York Times or their local paper cover-to-cover over coffee in the morning, nor return home to hear the news read by Walter Cronkhite or Dan Rather (then discuss it around the dinner table or around the water cooler or at the pub or over bridge or at the Elk’s Lodge).
What is the process of news and information gathering for the DN? Here’s a
hypothesis. It’s a three-step process: Grazing, Deep(er) Dive(s), and the Feedback Loop.
It works, in the paradigmatic sense, like this:
1) Grazing: The citizen gets introduced to new facts through a process of grazing. The source of the facts might be Jon Stewart; it might be an RSS reader with aggregated news sources; it might by a My Yahoo! page or Google news or a PubSub alert; it might be a filtered set of news offerings served up to a Blackberry; it might be passively listening to radio in the car or a news channel at the gym from the seat of a recumbent bike; it might be from peers or blogs (of the Scripting News, Instapundit variety — at once prominent and generous with links) or Drudge; or any number of other introducers of facts, including offline. The net effect is that the citizen has the bare fact, or the headline, and perhaps a bit more (on the order of a paragraph), but no real context. The fact may not be verified and may prove to be false or misleading. In terms of the competition to provide this service, speed and relevance are the sole factors.
2) Deep Dive: The citizen makes her decision that she wants to go beyond the headline, to learn more about a topic beyond the basic fact she’s been exposed to. This is where the citizen goes to dig for context for the fact that’s been introduced. The citizen might choose the “channel” for this information because of celebrity (she likes a certain news anchor’s hair); politics (she likes a certain slant on the news); brand (a given source has a brand that appeals to her); or other reasons. The deep dive helps to make sense of the news, to put it into a frame, to offer an analysis of it, to introduce relevant other voices. This is where trust, branding, credibility come in. This is where news organizations, especially powerful and wealthy institutions — able to afford bureaus and the like — can add the most value. Some blogs fill this role, too — Global Voices might be an example. (Query: is there any reason why you wouldn’t want 1000, or 1,000,000, or n, “channels” at this level, so long as we’re able to discern and choose? See the Daily Me debate and the like for counter-arguments.) The key factor is not speed here, though timeliness is important; the key factors are accuracy, trustworthiness, insight/analysis, and relationship.
3) Feedback Loop: This stage is not for everyone, and is the hardest for traditionalists to grapple with, but an increasing number of citizens want to take another step and to engage more meaningfully with the fact and the context. It might mean blogging something yourself on an obscure blog (like this one!), creating your own podcast or vlog, or commenting on someone else’s blog or a wiki or bulletin board. Or send an e-mail to a listserv or to a network news program. The idea is to talk back — to act as an empowered citizen, able to have an impact on the way the story is told. This feedback loop may be taken seriously, or it may not, by others in the citizen generated media movement, by mainstream media, by decision-makers. It’s in theory good for participatory and semiotic democracy. The role of media in the feedback loop might be to provide an easy means to do it, or to serve as an aggregator by topic of multiple viewpoints from the broader community (loop back to the “deep-dive” step). The feedback loop might also involve taking local news and making it of broader relevance, to a non-local audience. The key factor is the ability to participate with the hopes of being heard, able to affect the outcome of the debate in some fashion, even if only for a few people.
Consider the feedback loop open.
Alas, I was in DC on Friday and Saturday, so I missed the celebration and serious set of inquiries of Beyond Broadcast. Fortunately for me and others who were not there, John Bracken, program officer at the MacArthur Foundation, has a set of highlights from the conference and its reverberations.
Yochai Benkler’s recent lecture at HLS, a “very concise version” of the key arguments of his new book, The Wealth of Networks, is available in the form of a must-listen podcast at AudioBerkman (41:22; the book, at 500 pages, takes much longer — and is worth it.)
Also around Berkman today: a pre-meeting for One Web Day, organized by fellow David Isenberg, friend/prof Susan Crawford, et al. at 7:00 p.m. tonight in Harvard Square’s John Harvard’s Brewhouse.
And word has it that Beyond Broadcast may be about to sell out? Pretty cool. If you plan to come, sign up fast!
One of the questions we get all the time is: “how do I know what’s legal and illegal when I’m podcasting?” It’s one of those questions that can make a lawyer cringe, because you either 1) spend the rest of the cocktail party trying to give a decent answer or 2) you have to say it’s too complicated and the person should hire a lawyer.
So, a better answer: check out the hot-off-the-press Podcasting Legal Guide — not legal advice, exactly, but a wonderful text with answers to most questions, prepared through a joint initiative of Creative Commons (especially their terrific GC, Mia Garlick) and the law clinics at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
John Palfrey 
