Berkman Buzz: May 2, 2013

In 2000, the sociologist Robert Putnam was unambiguous in his concern that the new World Wide Web was leading to the decay of civic engagement. People were simply spending too much time online and becoming more comfortable with being disconnected from their physical space. Much has changed since the days of Alta Vista and personal homepages, but specifically the proliferation of social media and what I have elsewhere called net locality have led to a complex civic landscape where civic actions exist well beyond geographic communities and institutions. It is possible to advocate and to organize entirely online. Protesting Facebook’s newest privacy policy is a civic action, signing an online petition against the passage of SOPA and PIPA is a civic action, even joining a Kickstarter campaign to get a website funded can be a civic action. These “online” actions are civic insofar as they are taken to affect change in a community or institution outside of one’s private domain. In other words, the deliberate taking part in any social situation that extends beyond one’s immediate family and home can be considered civic.

Facebook is evaluating its policies regarding decapitation videos in response to some Mexican narcovideos: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22368287
—Andrés Monroy-Hernández (@andresmh)

As one of the fools pilloried in David Rieff's scathing attack on "cyberutopianism," I'm of two minds about responding. I've urged other authors unfairly characterized as cyberutopians to resist the temptation to respond to critics who misrepresent their arguments in the hopes of creating controversy. Rieff praises the most notorious of those critics, Evgeny Morozov, and deploys similar tactics, engaging less with my arguments than with a chimera that features my head alongside Ray Kurzweil's and others with a far more optimistic view of technology and change than I hold.

The image has been handed down throughout the long iconography of the West, most effectively transmitted in the image of Saint Jerome: the writer as a recluse, weaving spirited collocations of words in hushed seclusion. Jerome may have a lion at his feet, but he lacks other company — and, of course, he has no Wi-Fi. His condition is distinctly different from that of the modern writer; her room is not only well-lighted and likely lion-free, but also furnishes an Internet connection, through which the world’s tumult pours.

The first post in a #DPLA Blog series looking deeply at some of the objects available through the DPLA: http://bit.ly/13PBTEL
—Digital Public Library of America (@dpla)

On April 17, Larry Lessig discussed Free Culture.

On April 24, Robert Darnton, John Palfrey, and Brewster Kahle discussed Orphan Works and Digital Libraries.

This isn't another blog about “famine, Bono, or Barack Obama,” warns the blog Africa is a Country in its description on Facebook.

The ironically titled blog aims, among other things, to do away with the the narrative told and retold by western media that Africa is “a perpetual sob story”, Africa is a Country founder Sean Jacobs told Global Voices.

At the same time, Jacobs said, the blog is a collective of scholars, writers, artists, filmmakers, bloggers, and curators who together produce online commentary, original writing, media criticism, short videos, and photography that is working to reimagine Africa as a community.