Why do social movements organizing online that spawn huge protests so rarely create radical change like movements of the past? Gal Beckerman argues that it’s all about The Quiet Before, a sustained discourse where activists can organize and deliberate about how to enact the change they want to see. This week on Reimagining, Gal walks us through his new book, a history of radical movements.
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Forgetful Advertising with Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci
How could we curtail one of the most ambitious surveillance operations deployed in human history? This week on Reimagining, our very own Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci explains his new paper co-authored with Ethan outlining a new model for online advertising that eschews invasive data collection. Chand’s and Ethan’s paper “Forgetful Advertising: Imagining a More Responsible Digital Ad… Continue reading Forgetful Advertising with Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci
Gobo 2.0: All Your Social Media in One Place
Rather than opening one app for Twitter, another for Mastodon, and yet another for Reddit, what if you could view all three together? Furthermore, what if you could filter and prioritize your content from each platform, taking control of your own feed instead of depending on proprietary algorithms? This is what we are hoping to achieve with the next iteration of iDPI’s Gobo project.
Should You Leave Twitter for Mastodon?
What follows is the text of a tweet thread Ethan Zuckerman issued last week. Below it are some additional tweets embedded focusing on the case for leaving Twitter Long thread – buckle up. TL:DR; yes, you should join Mastodon. But you should stay on Twitter as well. What we need are more and different online… Continue reading Should You Leave Twitter for Mastodon?
Yale Journal of Law and Technology: Forgetful Advertising, Imagining a More Responsible Ad System
Chand and Ethan just published a long-in-the-making paper proposing a new system for targetted advertising that doesn’t rely on a surveillance model. Check it out in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology’s special issue “A Healthy Digital Public Sphere.”
Prospect (UK): Will AI make artists obsolete?
Ethan marvels an AI image generation software and wonders what the future of human-assisted creativity may look like.
See Through AI Hype with Arvind Narayanan
Arvind Narayanan is a Princeton computer science professor who wants to make it easy for you to cut through the AI. In a fascinating and plain old helpful interview, Arvid runs through all the big claims made about AI today and makes them very simple to understand.
Stanford Social Innovation Review: Solving Social Media’s ‘Local Paradox’
Chand and Ethan dig into the problem that while local networks offer ways to connect with local community members, they also host much more severe mis- and disinformation.
Welcome to Smalltown, a Civic Space Online
At iDPI we’re agitating for a smaller future of the Internet. To illustrate this, it’s helpful to think about rooms. Offline, there are all sorts of rooms that we gather in: there are churches, bars, gyms—what we do in each of those is pretty different. Facebook is like a big conference center, with high ceilings,… Continue reading Welcome to Smalltown, a Civic Space Online
Keyword: Interoperability
Interoperability — it’s a gruesome little chunk of jargon that refers to a fairly fundamental tenet of the Internet. Simply, it means that different applications and devices can share the same data with one another. As users, we enjoy interoperability daily.