Berkman Center Fellows Hour Course: Web Exceptionalism
type: channel
description: The blog for a course on Web Exceptionalism, designed and discussed by the 2010-2011 Berkman Center Fellows
date: 2011-03-11T04:05:38Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Yashomati Ghosh — Deployment of ICT in Support of India’s Rural Poor (February 1, 2011)
items: Doreen Tu — Computer Crimes in Taiwan (October 26, 2010)
items: Gender exceptionalism Disappointed
items: Jim Bessen — “Is technological innovation on the Web different?” (Oct. 5, 2010)
items: Clay Shirky – Losing the discipline of journalism
items: Alan Friedman – 9/21/2010
items: In Preparation

Yashomati Ghosh — Deployment of ICT in Support of India’s Rural Poor (February 1, 2011)
type: item
creator: babruzzi
date: 2011-03-11T04:05:38Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Yashomati Ghosh, Berkman Center Fellow and professor at the National Law School of India University, spoke on February 1, 2011 about efforts by the Indians federal government to deploy technology in support of an initiative to empower India’s rural poor. [My apologies to Yashomati for failing to post this write-up sooner. Brad A.] At the […]
encoded: Yashomati Ghosh, Berkman Center Fellow and professor at the National Law School of India University, spoke on February 1, 2011 about efforts by the Indians federal government to deploy technology in support of an initiative to empower India’s rural poor. [My apologies to Yashomati for failing to post this write-up sooner. Brad A.] At the outset, Yashomati said she was unsure whether the presentation would fit the Fellows Hour “web exceptionalism” theme, except perhaps by suggesting digital media and Internet technologies as tools of empowerment. Yashomati noted that at present less than 7% of the Indian population has Internet access. The occasion for the introduction of significant Internet access in rural India has been the federal government’s implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (“Gandhi Act” — my term, not Yashomati’s). Yashomati explained that the Gandhi Act is globally significant legislation. Its expressed objective is to provide work to rural people for a minimum of 100 days in a particular area, and the object of the work guarantees is to “bootstrap economic development.” Yashomati stated that the Gandhi Act reflects Gandhi’s own ideals. Gandhi was wont to observe that a country that focuses on rural development will develop itself. The law represents a significant policy shift in India away from its previous emphasis on urban development. The Gandhi Act hopes to bring India in line with UN Millennium Development Guarantees. Finally, the Gandhi Act advances India’s constitutional commitment to human dignity. At present, employment in rural areas is seasonal, because of the agricultural cycle. On the downside of the cycle, many of India’s rural laborers simply aren’t working — a fact that contributes to the growing problem of mass migration into urban areas. By providing 100 days’ work to rural poor who would otherwise be idle in the off-season, India expects to increase the rural population’s spending capacity o…

Doreen Tu — Computer Crimes in Taiwan (October 26, 2010)
type: item
creator: babruzzi
date: 2010-11-09T04:41:56Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: On October 26, 2010 Taiwanese prosecutor and Berkman Fellow Doreen Tu presented on web exceptionalism and the evolving treatment of computer-related criminal offenses in Taiwan. Doreen’s lively and thoughtful presentation offered interesting insights into the practice of law in Taiwan, on a subject of transnational import — as criminal impulses increasingly find their outlet online. [Apologies […]
encoded: On October 26, 2010 Taiwanese prosecutor and Berkman Fellow Doreen Tu presented on web exceptionalism and the evolving treatment of computer-related criminal offenses in Taiwan. Doreen’s lively and thoughtful presentation offered interesting insights into the practice of law in Taiwan, on a subject of transnational import — as criminal impulses increasingly find their outlet online. [Apologies to all — and especially Doreen — for the delay in writing up these notes. Brad A.] In 2003 Taiwan amended its Criminal Code to add a new chapter describing computer-related crimes. Prior to these amendments, Taiwan prosecuted computer-related offenses under the existing laws, which for the most part were adequate to reach online conduct of concern to prosecutors. A series of criminal complaints in the early 2000s put this assumption to the test, and ultimately the state determined that it needed computer-specific crimes on the books. Doreen asked: do we need to define specific “cybercrimes,” or are cybercrimes simply an online manifestation of ordinary criminal conduct, albeit accomplished with different tools (and against different targets)? For a period of time, the principal “cybercrimes” that had the attention of prosecutors in Taiwan were crimes with obvious “hard-copy” analogues that perpetrators had carried over onto the Internet. The existing Criminal Code was appropriately enforced against online instances of fraud, illegal gambling, child pornography and copyright infringement. Efforts to prosecute unauthorized access to or destruction or deletion of electronic data required a further analytical step: the law was required to treat electronic data as “property” or “documents.” Nonetheless, once this interpretation took hold, the state could bring appropriate charges under the existing laws proscribing vandalism or theft. Then “Lineage” came along to challenge this paradigm. Lineage is a popular online computer game, and Doreen credits it for triggering the 2003 amendm…

Gender exceptionalism Disappointed
type: item
creator: jreagle
date: 2010-10-25T16:42:05Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: As part of the fellows program at the Berkman Center this semester is a weekly discussion period that has the theme of Web Exceptionalism, the “belief (or attitude) that the Web is a significant break in the course of history, fundamentally changing institutions, norms, behaviors… It is not always proposed as a rigorous hypothesis, but […]
encoded: As part of the fellows program at the Berkman Center this semester is a weekly discussion period that has the theme of Web Exceptionalism, the “belief (or attitude) that the Web is a significant break in the course of history, fundamentally changing institutions, norms, behaviors… It is not always proposed as a rigorous hypothesis, but is often expressed in an optimism (and occasionally pessimism) that in the Age of the Web, we have opportunities for deep change.” My contribution questions the presumption that the “open” Web is a more equitable space with respect to gender. My concern is whether the ethos and rhetoric of free and open content communities suppresses responses to, or even leads to, discriminatory or alienating speech.

Jim Bessen — “Is technological innovation on the Web different?” (Oct. 5, 2010)
type: item
creator: babruzzi
date: 2010-10-12T02:40:09Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Jim Bessen gave last week’s “Web Exceptionalism” presentation at the Berkman Fellows Hour. Jim asked, “Is technological innovation on the Web different?” What follows here is an attempt at recapping a lively, high-level Fellows Hour discussion. To paraphrase [a no-doubt cringing] Wordsworth, liveblogging — as I’ve just come to learn — might best be described as […]
encoded: Jim Bessen gave last week’s “Web Exceptionalism” presentation at the Berkman Fellows Hour. Jim asked, “Is technological innovation on the Web different?” What follows here is an attempt at recapping a lively, high-level Fellows Hour discussion. To paraphrase [a no-doubt cringing] Wordsworth, liveblogging — as I’ve just come to learn — might best be described as a spontaneous overflow of note-taking recollected in tranquility, and the practice supplies ample opportunity for missing nuance and eliding worthy discussion points, both in the note-taking and in the tranquil recollection. That’s my long way around to an apology for the summation failing to live up to the event. (And sorry, too, for the time lag in getting this posted.) Here goes: At the outset, Jim makes clear that when talks of “innovation,” he means “technological innovation” and not cultural or production innovation. Web-related innovation is of course a part of that, but his principal focus is on how the Web facilitates innovation more broadly — and whether that facilitation is, per the Fellows Hour theme, “exceptional.” To be sure, Jim says, the Web enables a whole new level of collaboration (take, for example, open-source software). Digital media and the Internet reduce the cost of communication, with the result that you can cheaply and easily “pool knowledge” all across the globe. The conventional wisdom is that Internet collaboration has triggered a “revolution of innovation.” Jim isn’t convinced, and he urges us not to buy into the hype, which is in large part predicated on mythologies of pre-digital innovation (i.e., an inventor has a moment of inspiration, followed by several moments of perspiration, obtains a patent, and starts a company). In point of fact, the past was not so different. Pre-digital innovation was fraught with collaboration. Blast furnaces, steel minimills, U.S steamboats, the early PC — all of these significant technological advances were the products of extensive collaboratio…

Clay Shirky – Losing the discipline of journalism
type: item
creator: dweinberger
date: 2010-10-04T20:25:39Z
subject: Uncategorized
subject: clay shirky
subject: journalism
subject: media
subject: newspapers
subject: social media
description: Clay Shirky is leading a Berkman Fellows Hour session. [Note: What follows is live-blogging. I am undoubtedly getting things wrong, not getting emphases right, missing some crucial points, etc. You can rest assured that Clay was brilliant, and any deficiencies are due to my reporting. Really.] Clay begins by saying he’s an info junkie, and […]
encoded: Clay Shirky is leading a Berkman Fellows Hour session. [Note: What follows is live-blogging. I am undoubtedly getting things wrong, not getting emphases right, missing some crucial points, etc. You can rest assured that Clay was brilliant, and any deficiencies are due to my reporting. Really.] Clay begins by saying he’s an info junkie, and finds newspapers frustrating. The newspaper tells you that there’s been a coup somewhere, but you can’t get the backstory, although there’s sudoku and sports news. “Come back tomorrow for more information,” the paper implicitly says. The Web, on the other hand, lets us get all the info we want about any topic; there’s no width vs. depth trade-off. Clay says that he’s been assuming that since he likes the Web handles this, so everyone else must, too. He took this as a systematic good. But, he’s changing his mind about it. “Markets produce less accountable journalism than democracies need to govern.” That’s the lens he’s using. Democracies oscillate between two poles: a complete market-driven environment for news (in which case you get less news than you need to discipline elites) or you get more of that accountable journalism through subsidies that distort the news. There doesn’t seem to be a good, stable optimum. Optimizing for all interests is actually worse, he believes. He gives an example from today’s Boston Globe, about what the Secretary of Commerce is doing for area fisherman. Very few people — possibly in the low thousands — actually read the second paragraph. The article still is a signal that communicates to the elites something independent of the facts being reported: this is page B4 news. But, when the news junkies like Clay defect from newspapers (to newsfeeds, etc.), the paper loses its leverage; it can no longer tell the Secty of Commerce that he should keep working with the fisherman or we’ll get the story of his _not_ doing so promoted to page A1. Clay says he’s not nostalgic. This can’t be reversed. And the analo…

Alan Friedman – 9/21/2010
type: item
creator: Ethan Zuckerman
date: 2010-09-29T14:41:52Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Alan Friedman, fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard (CRCS), is inaugurating a new tradition at the Berkman Center: a fellows seminar. For years, the community of Berkman Fellows have met for discussion on Tuesdays afternoons. This year, we’re trying something a bit new. Each Tuesday, one or more of […]
encoded: Alan Friedman, fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard (CRCS), is inaugurating a new tradition at the Berkman Center: a fellows seminar. For years, the community of Berkman Fellows have met for discussion on Tuesdays afternoons. This year, we’re trying something a bit new. Each Tuesday, one or more of the fellows will offer a “seminar” on a topic, loosely connected to a central theme: internet exceptionalism. So Alan’s talk is addressing both his topic of choice – the dynamics of cybersecurity policy discussions – and a larger topic – are issues of security different in the world of the internet than in a pre-internet world? Alan gets the honor of leading off our seminar in part because he’s about to leave Berkman and begin work at a Washington DC policy center. As such, these issues are near and dear to his heart. He begins by warning us that he’s going to give “a short, general talk on cybersecurity designed to persuade people not to listen to short, general talks on cybersecurity.” His concern – we do a disservice to the complex ideas behind cybersecurity by melding multiple issues into one. He acknowledges that there are key computer security and information security issues that need addressing, but the focus for his provocation is on skepticism about the current framings of cybersecurity. Showing us the cover image from the July 1, 2010 issue of the Economist, which focused on cybersecurity, Alan attempts to unpack a four-page article in that newspaper. The article on cybersecurity covers over a dozen topics, including critical infrastructure, military strategy, cybercrime, financial fraud, economic espionage, espionage between states, and issues of global governance. These topics are so broad that it’s impossible for an individual to be knowledgeable about all fronts – in an academic context, each of these could be a full academic specialty. It’s important to unpack the discourse of cybersecurity because framing matters – how yo…

In Preparation
type: item
creator: rtabasky
date: 2010-09-03T21:30:49Z
subject: Uncategorized
description: Hello! You’ve found the blog for the 2010-2011 fellows hour course on Web Exceptionalism! More about the class and the topic can be found on the ‘about’ link towards the top left of the page.
encoded: Hello! You’ve found the blog for the 2010-2011 fellows hour course on Web Exceptionalism! More about the class and the topic can be found on the ‘about’ link towards the top left of the page.