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What is Civic Media?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins
Chris Csikszentmihalyi Beth Noveck Ethan Zuckerman: September 20, 2007; Running Time: 2:05:05

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

In launching the Center for Future Civic Media, Henry Jenkins challenges the notion that the technology we use every day for work and entertainment has fragmented society, driven individuals into private worlds, and played havoc with civic engagement. Jenkins perceives an “expanded notion of local emerging,” as individuals deploy different technologies to form new kinds of social and participatory networks. If “historically democracy was kept alive by micro rituals” like town pageants, picnics and state fairs, says Jenkins, new media might offer digitally based social rituals “to bring people together in powerful ways to enhance civic engagement.”

While technologies might bring opportunities for participation, Chris Csikszentmihalyi points out those technological devices in our society are produced and distributed to individual consumers not to empower them to play a greater part in civil society, but to enrich corporations “often at the expense of the community.” Much greater effort is spent on the commercialization of products for consumers than on developing technologies (such as public transportation) that could benefit entire cities or countries. Csikszentmihalyi says we “must reimagine not just technology that increases civic engagement” but “game the system toward better civic space.”

The romanticized ideal of the media has failed us, claims Beth Noveck, no longer promoting or leading to political participation. It is time to reinvent the traditional conception of civic media and use it as “a call to action, a basis for strengthening democracy,” says Noveck. We must build bridges between new technologies (Web 2.0), the content we’re developing and institutions of power, she states. Noveck has been exploring different forms of technology-enabled engagement such as visual technologies that help people comprehend policy and complex political questions; the Peer to Patent Project that uses a structured, participatory web process to help evaluate whether particular inventions deserve patents; and Democracy Island on Second Life, where tax protests and other community actions arise spontaneously.

Through his work in developing countries, Ethan Zuckerman has identified a phenomenon he calls “bridge blogging --someone using web 2.0 to challenge assumptions about a part of the world.” In many moderately repressive societies, blogging has become an increasingly useful way of creating a political movement, and publicizing it not just nationally but globally. Zuckerman’s Open Net Initiative has also investigated internet censorship internationally and discovered, for instance, that Saudi Arabia keeps users away from Playboy Magazine, and Pakistan won’t let its citizens visit blogger.com. “Once you bake censorship into tools, you can govern certain forms of behavior,” says Zuckerman. In countries with limited internet access, call-in a.m. radio and mobile phones fill in. Zuckerman worries that even if we “put the tools of authorship” into people’s hands in the developing world, there may not be adequate interest in the developed world to engage with these new global communicators.

Lecture Details

Location: Bartos Theater

About the Speakers

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities
Director of Comparative Media Studies Program

Henry Jenkins' books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. His previous books include "What Made Pistachio Nuts": Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic; Classical Hollywood Comedy; and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Jenkins has published articles on a diverse range of topics relating to film, television and popular culture. His most recent essays include work on Star Trek, WWF Wrestling, Nintendo Games, and Dr. Seuss.

Jenkins has a Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi

Research Scientist, MIT Media Lab
Director, MIT Center for Future Civic Media David and Roberta Loge Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

Chris Csikszentmihályi directs the Media Lab’s Computing Culture research group, which creates unique media technologies for cultural applications. He has worked at the intersection of new technologies, media, and the arts for 13 years, lecturing, showing new media work, and presenting installations in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.
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Csikszentmihályi is a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, author of Skin | Control (2005), and recently finished a solo exhibition at the Location One Gallery in New York’s Soho. He developed the world’s first robot journalist for battlefield reporting, the Afghan eXplorer, and the first robotic hip-hop dj, the DJ I, Robot Sound System. He is currently at work on an inexpensive Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for journalists doing war reporting, and a set of robots to explore and report information from Guantanamo.
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Csikszentmihályi received an M.F.A. from U.C. San Diego, and a B.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Beth Noveck

Professor of Law, New York Law School
Director, Institute for Information Law and Policy

Beth Noveck specializes in intellectual property and technology. She is developing the Community Patent Review project, the legal, policy and software framework to open patent examination for public participation. The project was named by the United States Patent and Trademark Office as one of its Strategic Initiatives 2007-2012. This is the first social software project to directly impact federal decisions.

Noveck is founder of the State of Play: Law and Virtual Worlds Annual Conference and a founder of Bodies Electric LLC, developer of the Unchat software for realtime structured and democratic group deliberation in cyberspace.

Noveck is also a Visiting Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and at Stanford University, Dept. of Communication. Noveck earned both her B.A. and M.A. from Harvard University. Her J.D. is from Yale Law School. After studying as a Rotary Foundation graduate fellow at Oxford University, she earned a doctorate at the University of Innsbruck with the support of a Fulbright grant.

Ethan Zuckerman

Fellow, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University Law School Co-founder, Global Voices and Geekcorps

Ethan Zuckerman became a fellow of the Berkman Center in January, 2003. In 2000, he founded Geekcorps, a non-profit technology volunteer corps that pairs skilled volunteers from US and European high tech companies with businesses in emerging nations for one to four month volunteer tours. Geekcorps became a division of the International Executive Service Corps in 2001, where Zuckerman served as a vice president from 2001-04. Earlier, Zuckerman helped found Tripod, an early pioneer in the web community space. Ethan served as Tripod's first graphic designer and technologist, and later as VP of Business Development and VP of Research and Development. After Tripod's acquisition by Lycos in 1998, Zuckerman served as General Manager of the Angelfire.com division and as a member of the Lycos mergers and acquisitions team.

In 1993, Zuckerman graduated from Williams College with a B.A. in Philosophy. In 1993-94, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Legon, Ghana and the National Theatre of Ghana, studying ethnomusicology and percussion.

Zuckerman received the 2002 Technology in Service of Humanity Award by MIT's Technology Review Magazine and named to the TR100, TR's list of innovators under the age of 35. Recently, Zuckerman was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum.