Monday, February 23, 2015

Philosophy Talk on Cyber Activism

The radio program Philosophy Talk invited me on to discuss issues of digital civil society. I thought we were going to discuss freedom of association, free expression, and the architecture of the Internet compared to the design choices coded into the apps and web sites built on top of it. I was excited to discuss civil society's need for software that encodes its values and the changing practices of nonprofits and digital humanitarians.

It didn't go quite like that, but we still had a good time. We wound up talking a lot about public-ness, privacy, and digital tools for organizing. You can hear the stream here. You can read Professors Perry and Taylor's blog post here and check out the transcript from a great follow-up web chat here. The questions in the web chat are really good and I found myself wanting to continue those conversations (but alas, that's not the way the technology works).

I cited the research of Zeynep Tufecki, Ethan Zuckerman, Marc Goodman, David Bollier, and Lee Sproull and the work of the Responsible Data Forum, Benetech, ACLU, and Electronic Frontier Foundation throughout the conversations.

And, in the interest of timeliness, read this piece from the Washington Post on how social medai still needs community organizing if change is really possible.

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