Berkman Buzz: February 10, 2012

After talking to a reporter about the Harvard culture around the time Mark Zuckerberg was here, I dug out some old email to jog my memory about the early efforts to move the Harvard House face books online. These were printed brochures with basic information and photos of members of each House, students and resident staff and tutors, which had long been used to create House community. It seems that some Houses started to create online versions of their Face Books around 1996, while I was dean, and I was involved with the discussions of uncoordinated effort duplication and privacy.

DPLA Dev Blog: Karen Coyle on modern data for the modern library http://hrvd.me/xoxrQA
—DPLA Dev Team (@dpladev)

All these examples of how the online interacts with offline are clear example of why questions like “face-to-face or online friendship?” or “was online or offline more important in the Arab spring?” are not fruitful. The answer is yes. Because there is no “virtual” world separate from this world. As Nathan Jurgenson, who often writes about “digital dualism”, puts it the correct model to understand the Internet is not that the Internet is the “Matrix” and this world is “Zion” a la the movie Matrix. The world is one.

The Federal Judicial Center has released a study which concludes that "detected social media use by jurors is infrequent, and that most judges have taken steps to ensure jurors do not use social media in the courtroom," and implies that juror use of the Internet and social media during trial is not a growing problem.

Alison Frankel of Thompson-Reuters is skeptical about this conclusion, and I agree with her.

Africa Is a Country, a wry but passionate blog devoted to “Africa” — the idea, not (simply) the song — in contemporary media (but “not about famine, Bono, or Barack Obama”) has been threatening to make a weekly series out of the genuinely remarkable resonance of Toto’s 1982 soft-rock anthem. It’s a begrudging tribute of sorts to the song’s “resilience as a piece of media about Africa.” Did you know that in addition to dozens of covers, which they promise to feature, the song is also popular sampling fodder for hip-hop producers (among them, Madlib).

Brazil may be first to use Twitter's geo-located censorship to block tweets about drunk driving checkpoints http://t.co/nrn8AISy—Herdict (@herdict)

MetaLAB cofounder Robert Gerard Pietrusko has collaborated with Stewart Smith and Bernd Lintermann in a piece called trans_actions: The Accelerated Art World 1989–2011, which explores the impact of the worldwide explosion of art biennials through immersive, panoramic visualizations of data on the global art market and the migration of art, artists, and their audiences.

The political crisis in the Maldives took an ugly turn on Wednesday 8 February, 2012, when police brutally beat and injured supporters of the ousted President Mohamed Nasheed as they protested against what they claimed to be a coup that removed the island nation's first democratically elected president from power.

In the riots that followed, Nasheed's supporters torched and destroyed a number of police stations, courts, local council offices and other public buildings. Scores of police officers were hurt in the violence too.