Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard University, said it’s difficult for people to say no when presented with immediate benefits because any potential problems are vague and years away.“Information seems harmless and trivial at the moment, but can be recorded forever . and can be combined with other data,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve come to terms with that yet.”
via Promise and peril in an ultra-connected world – The Washington Post.
One reason, perhaps, is that these new organizations are able to make decisions in a very different way. The traditional corporation was organized to limit the amount of information that flowed to the hierarchy, a concern that matters much less online, according to David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know, and senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The censorship issue presents a quandary for tech companies that often espouse free speech as part of their core ethos. It could also be a financial problem, since abiding by the government’s often vague censorship directives can be expensive. “The existing Chinese microblogging sites have had to invest in huge armies of individuals who spend their time looking through the content and determining what should or shouldn’t be removed,” says Ryan Budish, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “You can’t exactly just move in there and do business. It’s a very different framework.”
via LinedIn in China: Why China Is a Nightmare for U.S. Internet Companies | TIME.com.
Dr. danah boyd she prefers to style her name in lowercase letters is a cutting-edge scholar of technology at Microsoft Research Center, New York University, and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a youth advocate with the daunting research skills of an anthropologist and the political zeal of an activist. Her first book, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” Yale University Press: 296 pp., $25, proves she is a writer and thinker in a category of her own invention.
via A ‘Complicated’ look at teens and technology – latimes.com.
After all, 2013 research from the Pew Research Center and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society revealed that enthusiasm for Facebook was waning among teenagers for such reasons as a growing adult presence and the excessive sharing of information.
“Net neutrality rules fashioned by the FCC were largely thought to deal with retail access by customers — what consumers could and couldn’t be restricted from doing online — rather than on the internal peering arrangements within the system,” Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard University, told Mashable in an email. “Though the latter is no doubt something of great interest for the FCC to be following, since it can have such an impact on consumers.”
Op-ed from Berkman faculty member Susan Crawford
But Ryan Budish, project director of Herdict, was skeptical, saying “it’s always possible there could be a technical problem” but it’s “unlikely a technical bug would just happen to randomly affect the kinds of websites that activists and antigovernment protesters are using.”
via Twitter, Other Apps Disrupted in Venezuela Amid Protests of Maduro Government – WSJ.com.
Op-ed from Berkman faculty member Susan Crawford.
Maybe that’s because anyone trying to make that argument would be met with snorts of derision. In fact, a number of experts — like Susan Crawford of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, whose recent book “Captive Audience” bears directly on this case — have argued that the power of giant telecommunication companies has stifled innovation, putting the United States increasingly behind other advanced countries.