Berkman Buzz: March 16, 2012

The stories that Invisible Children create in their media put children at the front and center of them. And, indeed, as Neta Kliger-Vilenchik and Henry Jenkins explain, youth are drawn to this type of storytelling. Watch Kony 2012 from the perspective of a teenager or college student. Here is a father explaining to a small child what’s happening in Africa. If you’re a teen, you see this and realize that you too can explain to others what’s going on. The film is powerful, but it also models how to spread information. The most important thing that the audience gets from the film is that they are encouraged to spread the gospel. And then they are given tools for doing that. Invisible Children makes it very easy to share their videos, republish their messages on Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr, and “like” them everywhere. But they go beyond that; they also provide infrastructure to increase others’ attention.

I discussed "slacktivism" w/ Arab activists in Tunisia. They asked me if academics were all crazy as "slacktivism" was so helpful to them.
—Zeynep Tufekci (@techsox)

Bear 71 isn’t your grandfather’s grizzly. She knows the name of the drug that tranquilized her, knows too about Zoloft and Viagra, knows that her radio collar broadcasts in the VHF range. She can tell you that a rubber bullet is traveling 650km/hr at 100 feet. She reports that Canmore, near Banff in Alberta, gets five million tourists a year. She knows about the fate of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, and the prospect of bringing the species back through genetic engineering. And she knows that the creatures capable of making this happen are also capable of forgetting to close the lid on a garbage can. Finally, she knows that she’s the eponymous narrator of Bear 71 by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendez, The latest work from National Film Board of Canada Interactive.

If there is a polar opposite to organizations like ours, it is the intellectual property troll. And in the IP troll heirarchy, one of the trolliest has long been Righthaven, the self-described "pre-eminent copyright enforcer" that sued hundreds of bloggers and other Internet denizens apparently as part of its business model. If the DMLP, the EFF, Public Citizen, and the like are the Justice League, Righthaven would be in the Secret Society of Supervillians.

So it is with no small amount of glee I pass along the news that Righthaven appears to have finally run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

Comunes is a non-profit collective (mainly based in Madrid but with an international community) dedicated to facilitating the use of free/libre web tools and resources to collectives and activists alike, with the hopes of encouraging the Commons. I very much enjoy their approach and think are doing a great job.

This last week Comunes released a text under the name “Hack for your Rights: Hacker ethics understood as a simultaneous and global game in the search for structural changes in any area of society”. In their terms: “Our intention in this text is to extrapolate some ideas extracted from struggles and conquests in the digital world, and apply them in the search for change in other areas of our society”. In doing so, they points to Wikipedia and the free software projects as examples of “winning”. To then encourage that anyone can be a “hacker”, meaning anyone can act to transform society. To end up arguing that “To oppose is not enough; neither can we do just anything”. Here is my reaction to the text.

I just uploaded "Buying Votes" on Vimeo: http://t.co/UEgxRVKi
—Larry Lessig (@lessig)

In an important victory for freedom of speech, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued a decision today in two related cases, Commonwealth v. Barnes and Commonwealth v. Diorio. The cases concerned WBUR‘s OpenCourt project, and the Court’s decision follows a long line of precedent in holding that courts generally may not restrain media organizations or others that attend public court proceedings from reporting on those proceedings. The Cyberlaw Clinic had the privilege to serve as co-counsel to OpenCourt in both cases, alongside Larry Elswit of Boston University’s Office of General Counsel. Jeff Hermes of the Digital Media Law Project (a frequent Clinic collaborator and a project, like the Clinic, based at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society) serves on OpenCourt’s advisory board.

While the Kony 2012 campaign certainly received the attention it sought, many Ugandans and Africans felt its message lacked the nuance required by context, and was more focused on raising funds for the organisation's own survival rather than empowering the people affected by the conflict.

Furthermore, many African citizens felt that once again, the narrative of a highly publicized story about Africa centered on a negative story and neglected the upwards trends the continent has been witnessing.

As a counter measure, many people started posting stories on Twitter about “what they love about Africa” with the hash tag #WhatILoveAboutAfrica.

The initiative, spearheaded by Semhar Araia, a blogger at the Diaspora African Women Network (DAWNS), started to trend worldwide on Twitter on March 13, 2012.