REWIRE: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (6/25); Open Access and the Humanities (6/27)

book launch

REWIRE: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection

Tuesday, June 25, 6:00pm ET, Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East Rooms. This event will be webcast live. Reception to follow.

We live in an age of connection, one that is accelerated by the Internet. This increasingly ubiquitous, immensely powerful technology often leads us to assume that as the number of people online grows, it inevitably leads to a smaller, more cosmopolitan world. We’ll understand more, we think. We’ll know more. We’ll engage more and share more with people from other cultures. In reality, it is easier to ship bottles of water from Fiji to Atlanta than it is to get news from Tokyo to New York.

In Rewire, media scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman explains why the technological ability to communicate with someone does not inevitably lead to increased human connection. At the most basic level, our human tendency to “flock together” means that most of our interactions, online or off, are with a small set of people with whom we have much in common. In examining this fundamental tendency, Zuckerman draws on his own work as well as the latest research in psychology and sociology to consider technology’s role in disconnecting ourselves from the rest of the world.

For those who seek a wider picture—a picture now critical for survival in an age of global economic crises and pandemics—Zuckerman highlights the challenges, and the headway already made, in truly connecting people across cultures. From voracious xenophiles eager to explore other countries to bridge figures who are able to connect one culture to another, people are at the center of his vision for a true kind of cosmopolitanism. And it is people who will shape a new approach to existing technologies, and perhaps invent some new ones, that embrace translation, cross-cultural inspiration, and the search for new, serendipitous experiences.

Rich with Zuckerman’s personal experience and wisdom, Rewire offers a map of the social, technical, and policy innovations needed to more tightly connect the world.

Featured respondents will include Judith Donath (Berkman Center Fellow), Ann Marie Lipinski (curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard), and David Weinberger (Co-Director of the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab).

Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the Center for Civic Media, is cofounder of the citizen media community of Global Voices. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

co-sponsored event

Open Access and the Humanities

Wednesday, June 27, 2-4pm ET, Barker Center, Harvard University. Sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, The Department of History, The Humanities Division, The Mahindra Center for the Humanities, and The Office for Scholarly Communication, Harvard University.

The greatest successes of the Open Access movement have taken place within the sciences where the tipping point was all but reached in 2012. In the humanities, however, there has been a greater degree of skepticism as to the cross-applicability of the models deployed in scientific publishing and the argument continues to rage. In this talk, we detail the background to open access publishing more broadly in historical terms before sequentially evaluating the economic models, social strategies and areas of contention within the humanities subjects themselves.

Speakers: Martin Eve and Caroline Edwards, Academic Project Directors, The Open Library of the Humanities: www.openlibhums.org more information on our website>

berkman luncheon series