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Technologies and Emerging Democracies: Building a Better Gatekeeper

Ethan Zuckerman: October 8, 2008; Running Time: 1:09:25

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Don’t forsake The New York Times for online media, instructs Ethan Zuckerman, because newspapers provide opportunities for learning about the world largely unavailable in the digital kingdom. Zuckerman points in particular to the “serendipity box” -- that intensely local or exotic piece that often grabs attention at the bottom of the front page. This “juicy bait on a hook,” as he calls it, often leads to an in-depth, fascinating report about a culture or perspective far removed from most Americans’. At a time when the world has become connected by infrastructure of all kinds, it behooves Americans to take a closer look at our neighbors, especially those in developing nations. But capturing people’s attention on these matters, says Zuckerman, turns out to be a “surprisingly difficult problem.”

In the age of the web, traditional gatekeepers such as broadcast anchors and newspaper editors wield less clout. The internet, increasingly the primary source of information for millions, doesn’t maintain gatekeepers as much as self-publishing bloggers or user groups that clump together around specific interests. Useful search technology, such as the collaborative filtering employed by Netflix, helps you find the kinds of things you’re interested in, based on previously expressed preferences. But these kinds of prediction systems won’t surprise you, and, says Zuckerman, “are more likely to trap (you) in a circle of recommendations.”

Current web searches encourage homophily, says Zuckerman, the tendency to flock together. While this clustering by like-minded people is part of human nature, it becomes problematic when it guides our exposure to media and information. “In a global world, we’ve gotten much better at moving stuff around than ideas and perspectives. Moving stuff around can be incredibly dangerous,” says Zuckerman. “We isolate ourselves in political cocoons, and nationalist cocoons” at our peril.

To break out of these “echo chambers,” Zuckerman has developed a method called “bridging,” which he employs in his Global Voices web project. He finds people from around the world to act as filters for what’s happening in their country, and as translators of both language and context. These bridge bloggers are “people with feet in two worlds.” One blogger Zuckerman mentions works to explain Bahrain to the rest of the world, “trying to dispel the image Muslims and Arabs suffer from.” While this is a start, Zuckerman wonders how he can better “engineer serendipity” to help us “resist homophily,” lest we get stuck in the digital age wearing blinders.

Lecture Details

Location: MIT Museum

“My sense is that it’s literally not responsible to be hyper-local in this world. If you’re going to take on interesting problems, whether economic, social, environmental, you must look to solve them on a global scale. ”

Ethan Zuckerman

About the Speaker

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.

Ethan Zuckerman

Zukerman's website

About the Host

About the Host

MIT Museum

Cutting-edge technologies, amazing holograms, and the beauty of Harold Edgerton's strobe photography entertain, educate, and enlighten at the MIT Museum. Robotics, underwater exploration, kinetic sculptures, and the variety of interactive programs and historic collections attract visitors and researchers from around the world. This unique museum recently opened the Mark Epstein Innovation Gallery featuring some of the latest work of selected research groups at MIT.