Radio Berkman

Step into a world where information floats through the open air — around your house, around your town, around the world — just waiting for you to reach up and grab it. Music, movies, phone calls from loved ones, the sound of your baby crying — it all travels in the charged particle space known as Spectrum. Your average consumer might interact with a dozen or more devices on a daily basis, designed specifically to both emit and pluck information to and from the air. But how much do we really understand spectrum? There are fights going on right now between regulators, media and telecommunications companies, and consumers about how spectrum is bought, sold, and used. Today’s guest argues that we need to go back to basics to effectively settle these battles. Christian Sandvig is a Berkman Center Fellow and director of the Project on Public Policy and Advanced Communication Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. On this week’s show David Weinberger and Sandvig elegantly deconstruct Spectrum, and give us some ideas as to how we can use this space more effectively. CC Music this week: Jeremiah Jacobs: Bounce Loops

Last week the FCC announced that they would seek a “third way” in regulating the broadband industry, one that they hope will respect a recent court decision prohibiting them from cracking down on telecomms, while also ensuring some level of net neutrality. Susan Crawford co-led the FCC Agency Review team for the Obama-Biden transition team and served as President Barack Obama’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy until December 2009. She now teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. She founded OneWebDay and can be found blogging here. Susan spoke with David Weinberger about what the FCC’s “third way” is, and what it could mean for how bits get to your house. Creative Commons music used this week: Scott Altham

Does the discussion of a free and open internet really have to be an ideological debate? Some would say the situation is black or white, open or closed. You are either for freedom of content, the right to post anonymously, and to opt out of having your data tracked, or you are in favor of censorship, filtering, and monitoring. But delve deeper into the discussion and you’ll notice the nuance. In fact, if you don’t notice some caveats in the debate you’re probably not looking deeply enough. One person who has spent a lot of time looking at those caveats is legal expert and Berkman Center fellow Donnie Dong. He says there is room for more than one perspective on how the net should work, and cautions against pursuing a common denominator along ideological lines. Culturally, linguistically, and individually we do not see a unified internet, regardless of the technological underpinnings that bring us together on the web. Donnie says the multi-cultural web we are currently experiencing represents a kind of “cyberpluralism,” a phenomenon that would be good to acknowledge as we debate the future of the web. Music this week: Scott Altham – Hear Us Now Childish Gambino – Baby Doll

How could pirates and the content industries learn to get along? In many contexts they are beginning to get along quite well. Some in the film, software, and music industries are finding ways to use pirate markets to their advantage — rather than simply using law enforcement to shut them down. Recent research is showing that pirated versions of films, software, and albums actually are reaching a market that wouldn’t otherwise be purchasing these goods legitimately — whether due to cost or general inaccessibility. Joe Karaganis of the Social Science Research Council gives us the scoop on piracy in developing countries. CC Music this week: Ducket – Another Girl J Lang – Crazy Love

In 2008, Michael Slaby served as Chief Technology Officer from Obama for America, and helped with technology policy as the Obama campaign transitioned to an administration. One of the most difficult aspects of the transition has come in trying to keep a huge group of grassroots, web-enabled supporters, after the campaigning is over and the policy making has begun. Today David Weinberger speaks with Michael about how government uses the web to stay engaged, and some of the policies regarding freedom and the internet that the administration has pursued since taking office. CC Music this week: Jasptertine: Pling Jeremiah Jacobs

In an age when every conversation, email, and tweet could be digitally archived, how honest we are – or how deceptive – is open for scrutiny. But there is still a lot we don’t know about the nature of deception. How can we tell if someone is telling the truth? Are there verbal cues, in addition to the sweaty palms and rapid heartbeat? Is there a difference between lies, or is every lie the same? And how does the medium of conversation – an email, a text message, a phone call – affect the type of lie we might tell? This week on the podcast, Judith Donath interviews Jeff Hancock, of the Social Media Lab at Cornell University, on how we lie, and the role technology plays in the evolution of the lie. CC Music this week: Neurowaxx: Pop Circus Robert Rich: Cowell Piano

Some people guard their privacy online jealously. As much as they want free email and facebook, they shudder at thoughts of having their data scraped, email addresses exposed, and photos indexed. But the trend of web services is not in favor of these digital hermits. More and more social networks and applications are popping up, allowing users to trade their personal information for cheap and amazing services. One such service – Blippy.com – is like a Twitter for your debit card. Sign up with Blippy, and you can immediately and automatically share info about what you buy, watch, and listen to with your own social network or the whole world. David Hornik loves Blippy. He loves the trend towards radical transparency. And as an investor with August Capital – who’ve helped give life to successful startups like evite and stumbleupon – he’s got his eye on where this trend could be going. And by the way, you can follow what David purchases at his public blippy account. Previous Episodes in this thread: Adventures in Anonymity Part II: The Future of Transparency and How to Stop It – Joel Reidenberg of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham on re-engineering the web to fight transparency’s most dangerous effects Adventures in Anonymity Part I – Sam Bayard, Assistant Director of the Citizen Media Law Project on whether legal action could put online anonymity out of commission

High speed internet may be scarce in the US, but the dream of having web be fast/cheap/everywhere is snowballing. The FCC’s much anticipated National Broadband Plan was finally released Tuesday. And Google’s Fiber Initiative – a move to finance and deploy an unbelievable gigabit speed connection to some yet-to-be-named lucky town or towns in the United States – has energized dozens of small communities across the nation. Today we talk to the IT Manager of one of these towns – Michael Cross of Kalamazoo, Michigan – to see just what they see in the opportunity of ultra high speed connectivity. CC Music this week: Jeremiah Jacobs – Pushing Past

Millions of people are now interacting in virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft using the guise of avatars. In these spaces, users can actually design their avatars to be subtly or radically different from who they are in real life. And it turns out how people interact through their avatars – the signals they give one another through conversation and appearance – can tell us a lot about the choices and biases that inform our behavior in the real world. Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab has been doing a number of experiments with people, avatars, and virtual worlds. As avatars become more common and more useful outside of gaming – people are already using avatars for virtual workplaces, customer service, and advertising – questions of ethics, trust, and honesty become significantly more important. After all, it’s one thing if your avatar is casually conversing with, battling, or dating another avatar who might not be what he or she seems in real life. It’s quite another when corporations or political candidates realize that they can handcraft an avatar to take advantage of your biases and earn your trust for their own purposes. Jeremy sat down with Judith Donath – who leads the Berkman Center’s Law Lab Spring 2010 Speaker Series: The Psychology and Economics of Trust and Honesty – to talk more about this fascinating topic. CC Music: Jaspertine: “Pling”

Transparency challenges the very existence of the Rule of Law. That is the very provocative thesis of today’s guest, who suggests that there is a tragedy behind the web’s powerful lubricative effect on the flow of information. Data about your address, purchases, academic performance, travel itineraries, likes and dislikes are all quite simple to track down these days at little or no cost. We often give up this information voluntarily, in the interests of cultural participation, or obliviously when we simply skip a privacy notice. And where it once took teams of archivists and researchers to dig up and collate dirt on people and institutions, today’s powerful automated online databases wield personal data over their subjects almost tyrannically, voiding the engineered obscurity of the past, and rendering anonymity obsolete. Joel Reidenberg is the academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University. We sat down with him to ask how we could re-engineer the web to fight transparency’s most dangerous effects. CC Music this week: Stefsax: “I Like it Like That (s.thaens)” State Shirt: “Computer”

This week we sit down with Carl Malamud, who with the group Public.Resource.org is pushing to put law in the public domain. We covered the issue of copyright on law a few months ago in Radio Berkman 129, where Steve Schultze introduced us to RECAP – a software that helps legal researchers bypass hefty fees for access to legal documents. There is now a movement afoot, not just to bypass the system that puts law behind a paywall, but to remove it altogether. If you think this is a small issue – note that Americans spend some $10 billion a year just to access legal documents, everything from local building codes to Supreme Court records. The Executive Branch alone pays $50 million to access district court records. Some cash-strapped law schools ration students’ access to per-page charging services for legal records. And journalists, non-profits, and average citizens interested in legal research are feeling just as nickeled-and-dimed by fees. David Weinberger and Carl Malamud sat down to talk about the chances for freeing the written word of the law. CC Music this week: General Fuzz – “Cream” Ghost – “Ice and Chilli”

When the Federal Communications Commission announced in April of 2009 that they would be pursuing a National Broadband Plan – picture something as ambitious as the interstate highway initiative but for bytes instead of cars – web surfers with a need for speed began warming up their mouse muscles. It seems like we’ve sat on the side of the road while our friends in Europe and Asia have zoomed past us in the race to faster net speeds at cheaper prices. But how does the US really stack up to the rest of the world? As part of their Broadband Plan the FCC commissioned Yochai Benkler and a team of researchers at the Berkman Center to put together an international review of broadband deployment and policy. The result is an exhaustive 333-page report showing the US roughly in the middle of 30 industrial nations – in terms of speed, penetration, and cost. How did we end up in the middle? And more importantly, how did so many other countries get ahead? Yochai sat down with David Weinberger to talk about how they found these results, and what the US could do to ambitiously pursue a faster web. CC Music this week: Jeremiah Jacobs – Pushing Past BOCrew – SoulCornerBeat Photo courtesy of flickr user paulnich

Rural communities don’t usually have the same support networks for queer youth that you might find in big cities or college towns. Mary L. Gray spent two years working in small rural communities in Kentucky, and found that as queer youth are forming their identities here, the experiences they have in the real world often blur with experiences with communities and peer groups online. Mary calls the blending of town squares, churches, schools, and community centers in real life, and their virtual counterparts Boundary Publics. And the way these boundary publics function as support networks and outlets for expression can make a real difference in the lives of young people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and questioning. Mary L. Gray is from the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and is the author of Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America.

We’ll be back soon with more full episodes of Radio Berkman. In the meantime, we’d like to share a clip from a short interview we did not long ago with Lawrence Liang of the Alternative Law Forum on piracy, media, and culture.

When under threat from an approaching feline, gazelles will repeatedly leap up and down in the air – even when logically it seems they should run. It’s an example of a signal – used to communicate a concept to trigger a reaction. In this case, “I am strong and fast – if you chase me you’ll be wasting your time.” What does this phenomenon of nature have to do with human communication online? We give off signals all the time – to deceive, to attract, to manipulate, to provoke reactions and establish impressions of who we are. We have gotten used to practices of signaling in person. But the web has completely changed how we signal. Judith Donath, founder of MIT’s Sociable Media research group, is completing a book on signaling theory and online communications called Signals, Truth, and Design. Today she stops by Radio Berkman to chat about signaling and human behavior on the web. Creative Commons music used this week from Jeremiah Jacobs.