Not Quite a Blog

Just a quick test of a flash-based audio plugin...

Not sure exactly how I'll use this yet...

Link: http://groups.ischool.berkeley.edu/podcast/audio/edley-pew-2008.mp3

The high-point of last weeks' Pew/JEHT conference, "Voting in America", was seeing the Dean of Berkeley Law, Chris Edley, give a keynote during dinner on Tuesday. With his permission, I am making available audio from his address. Find it here (30 minutes long and 18MB in size):

Chris starts by talking from the perspective of being part of the Obama transition team and to what extent election reform will be a focus. He then goes on to describe his views on federalism vs. localism in election administration, building a consensus vision for election reform and how we need to spark desire for election reform by arguing in terms of fundamental values.

Read on for my summary of his talk...

Disclaimer: any errors in the summary below are my own, and apologies for the few instances of side-talk in the audio.

In terms of the transition, he comes out the gate saying that there are, undoubtedly, more pressing matters demanding the incoming Presidents attention (i.e., the economy, national security, energy & climate change, health care, education and immigration):

I don't expect weekly meetings with the President to talk about election administration. Frankly, we probably don't want him to be having weekly meetings about election administration given [this list of priorities].

He then went on to the meat of his remarks, describing a few areas where he thinks reform should go forward.

He first talked about the divided philosophies at work in election administration. He was surprised in previous work, with the US Commission on Civil Rights and the Carter-Ford Commission, that many people involved with elections "think of the franchise as this precious jewel box that they have to guard carefully... and be very careful about who can hold it, open it and polish it." This is in contrast with people who consider voting as "something that should be shared widely so that democracy can flourish." Bridging this divide is one important assignment for election reformers... in his words: "The distinction between election administration and voting rights should disappear, and we should be united on an agenda of election rights."

Chris then went on to describe the complexity of the politics surrounding elections: "Our governance strategy for election administration [...] puts us in a situation where the infrastructure of our democracy is competing with potholes... and parks... and prisons... and health care... and pensions... and education." Federalism, often ends up protecting election officials when they make wacky, disparate decisions about the administration of elections. In Edley's view:

I would suggest to you that our aspirations for democracy in the 21st century are not the same as they were in the latter part of the 18th century. The strategy for bringing about the quality of democracy we want, I think is going to require some compromises on our commitments to localism in this arena. [...] I think we passed a milestone [in Florida 2000] in which localism is going to be increasingly forced to deal with the demands of a national sense of what is fair, what is efficient and what is truly democratic.

Edley then described how the real problems we have are in terms of inequality: the huge disparities in spoiled ballots, purged voters, waits in lines, etc.:

The question is whether the quality of the democratic infrastructure is coded to your ZIP code or your color. The next great challenge is to think of Bush v. Gore, not in the technical sense but in the aspirational sense, that everyone in the polity deserves the same quality of support for their effort to engage in the political process.

Edley does recognize that "fairness" is a large gray area, but that there are real problems in how "fair" our election experience actually is. Referencing the Governor of Virginia's comments that people wait in lines for other things---why not voting?---and the Secretary of State of Florida's similar comments that day about waiting in line at Disney World:

This is not Zimbabwe. We should not create a new poll tax in the form of a 2, 3, 4 hour wait to cast a vote.

That is, for example, large disparities in wait times within a jurisdiction are patently unfair. We need to work to address these sources of unfairness.

So, what are the next steps in Edley's mind? He made the point that national voter ID is not seen as an anathema in other countries. This is to say, by example, we need to use technologies to give us leverage to improve the process and promote fairness where we can:

[On the Carter-Ford Commission,] the reason were were enthusiastic about touchscreens is that we sensed the potential for assisting language minorities and people with disabilities. We sensed the potential of making voting as flexible as getting money out of an ATM; the possibility that the technology, wherever you were in the country, could flash on the screen the ballot appropriate for the jurisdiction in which we reside.

We should decide collectively what is that vision---5, 10, 15 years from now---so that we're moving in the same direction on multiple paths. That consensus-building effort is the single most important thing we can do in the next two years.

Edley then talked briefly about voter fraud. From his perspective, he sees largely unfounded claims about the extent of voter fraud. So he called for a substantial research investment in understand the characteristics of vote fraud.

He wraps his talk up about talking about fomenting reform via attention to nuts and bolts versus focusing change in terms of values:

What we have to do is not to improve the quality of election administration, what we have to do is be advocates for, be warriors for election rights. It's making people believe that they have a right to world-class infrastructure for this democracy. To let people believe they have a right to be able vote with ease and have their vote counted and have their officials be accountable. It's not just about public administration: it's about our freedoms, it's about our character and it's about our hopes. Now, that's sex.... and it's a hell of a lot more important than potholes.

Link: http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/podcast/audio/Helen_Nissenbaum_UCiSchool_02Apr2008.mp3

NYU’s Helen Nissenbaum gave a lecture entitled, “Privacy in Context” at the School of Information yesterday as the last Distinguished Lecture of the semester. You can find audio of her talk here and photos here.

Abstract

Contemporary practices of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating personal information have placed impossible demands on the concept of privacy. The weight of these demands, in turn, is reflected in norms, laws, policies, and technical requirements that frequently seem to miss the mark, failing to negotiate a reasonable course between unbridled opportunism, on the one hand, and suspicious intransigence, on the other. This talk will present key elements in the theory of contextual integrity, which builds upon structural aspects of social life to enrich our understanding of privacy and its importance as a moral and political value. Allowing context-relative social norms and context-based social values into the scope of analysis enables nuance and subtle discrimination, often missing in other dominant approaches, in modeling and theorizing privacy as well as adjudicating and justifying particular privacy claims.

Bio

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where she is also a Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute. Grants from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security have supported her research on privacy, trust online, security, intellectual property, and several projects investigating moral and political values embodied in computer and information systems, notably, search engines, video games, and facial recognition systems. She has produced three books, Emotion and Focus, Computers, Ethics and Social Values (co-edited with D.J. Johnson), and Academy and the Internet (co-edited with Monroe Prince), and co-founded the journal Ethics and Information Technology. Before joining the faculty at NYU, Nissenbaum served as Associate Director of Princeton University’s Center for Human Values and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. She earned a B.A. (Honors) from the University of Witwatersand, Johannesburg, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford.

Link: http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/podcast/audio/KeenDuguid_UCiSchool_19Mar2007.mp3

Today, the UC Berkeley School of Information hosted, as part of its distinguished lecture series, a debate between Andrew Keen and Paul Duguid, moderated by Geoff Nunberg (the event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media, Mass Communications at UC Berkeley, and the UC Berkeley Library).

The turnout was spectacular and the debate lively. Here is the audio of the debate (48MB mp3) and here are a number of photos.

(below is the abstract and bios from the lecture announcement)

Is the Web a Threat to Our Culture?

Abstract: When Time Magazine named “YOU” as their 2006 Person of the Year, it highlighted what has been deemed the democratization of the media. The term “Web 2.0” was coined to describe this transformation on the internet, where individual volunteers, not institutions, control its content. But many people share doubts about the hype around Web 2.0 and have different ideas about what’s significant, what’s trivial, and what’s irrelevant. Protagonists, such as Andrew Keen, believe that it is not only significant, but is significant enough to threaten “our economy, our culture, and our values.”

Please join UC Berkeley Adjunct Professor Paul Duguid and Andrew Keen in a debate about whether Web 2.0 is truly a threat to our culture. Adjunct Professor Geoffrey Nunberg will moderate the debate.

Bios

Andrew Keen is a Silicon Valley author, broadcaster and entrepreneur whose provocative book Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture was recently acclaimed by The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani as “shrewdly argued” and written “with acuity and passion”. Andrew is a prominent media personality who has appeared on the “Colbert Report”, “McNeil-Lehrer Newsnight” show, “The Today Show”, “Fox News”, “CNN International”, “NPR’s Weekend Edition”, “BBC Newsnight” and many other television and radio shows in America and overseas. He has written for The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the London Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, The Weekly Standard, Fast Company and Entertainment Weekly and has been featured in numerous publications including Time Magazine, The New York Times, US News and World Report, BusinessWeek, Wired, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, the Independent and MSNBC. Andrew is also a pioneering Silicon Valley media entrepreneur, having founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a well known first generation Internet music company. Educated at the universities of London and California, Andrew now lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and two children.

Paul Duguid is an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information; a professorial research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London; and an honorary fellow of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development at Lancaster University School of Management. At Berkeley, he co-teaches the “Quality of Information” and the “History of Information”, and his current research interests include the history and development of trademarks and a three-year archival research project funded by the ESRC of the UK and administered through Queen Mary, University of London. Throughout the 1990’s, he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and his book The Social Life of Information, co-written with John Seely Brown, is a reflection on the digital bombast of that era.

Geoffrey Nunberg (moderator) is an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information; a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University; and a consulting professor in the Stanford Department of Linguistics. He serves as chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, contributes a feature on language on the NPR show "Fresh Air", and has written numerous commentaries on language for the Sunday New York Times Week in Review and other periodicals. His linguistics research includes work in semantics, pragmatics, text classification, and written-language structure; he also studies the social and cultural implications of digital technologies.

Link: http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/podcast/audio/Henry_Jenkins_UCiSchool_06Feb2008.mp3

Henry Jenkins is the Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Flores Professor of Humanities. On Wednesday, February 6th, 2008, Professor Jenkins spoke at the UC Berkeley School of Information as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series.

The audio for this lecture, titled “Combating the Participation Gap: Why New Media Literacy Matters,” is available here.

The abstract for his talk was:

According to recent studies by the Pew Center on the Internet And American Life, more than half of American teens online have produced media content and about a third have circulated media that they have produced beyond their immediate friends and family. These statistics reflect the growing importance of participatory culture in the everyday lives of American young people. Work across a range of disciplines suggest that these emerging forms of participatory culture are important sites for informal learning and may be the crucible out of which new conceptions of civic engagement are emerging. Drawing on insights from a recent white paper produced for the MacArthur Foundation, this talk will discuss the need to develop new forms of media literacy pedagogy which reflects this context of a participatory culture, materials which both respond to the ethical challenges confronted by those teens who are already producing and circulating their own media as well as the challenges confronting those youth who are excluded from participation in these on-line worlds as a consequence of lack of access to technologies, skills, competencies, and cultural experiences taken for granted by their contemporaries. These issues can not be understood through a simple opposition between digital natives and digital immigrants, but rather require us to dig deeper into the diverse range of experiences young people have online and the range of different interactions between adults and teens in these new participatory culture. In the course of the presentation, I will be sharing a range of curricular materials and activities being developed by MIT’s Project nml to support the teaching of these new social skills and cultural competencies.

His bio:

Henry Jenkins is the Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Flores Professor of Humanities. He is also the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Jenkins writes regularly about media and cultural change at his blog, henryjenkins.org. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games and of the Knight Center for Future Civic Media, a joint effort with the MIT Media Lab to use new media to enhance how people live in local communities. He is one of the principle investigators for GAMBIT, a lab focused on promoting experimentation through game design, and of Project nml, a MacArthur Foundation funded project that develops curricular materials focused on promoting the social skills and cultural competencies needed to become a full participant in the new media era. Jenkins has a MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.