Two weeks ago was the first cyberscholars meeting of 2008. The cyberscholars is a group that was originally founded by Urs Gasser and is now a monthly meeting composed of the fellows and affiliates at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the Yale Information Society Project and the good people from MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program.
We had some amazing people speak. Benjamin Mako Hill from MIT was the first speaker and talked about the educational value of errors in unexpected places. He has a blog where he documents all these, Revealing Errors. His argument is that when errors occur out of context, they make you realize that software, hardware and computers are not ‘natural’ but are constructed; things can go wrong, errors are man made, just like the actual device is man made. He thinks that errors are useful in showing people they can empower themselves by learning to take control of these devices, of technology. Later on, I had a talk with kxu about whether people /should/ be empowered: what if they don’t want to? We were drawing the comparison to how some people prefer a full manual photo camera where you can adjust all the settings to a full automatic camera that just snaps pictures for you. Is it fair to draw a similar analogy to free software?
The second speaker was Ben Peters, who had a fascinating talk looking into the question why the internet failed in the Soviet Union. His short answer: decentralization. Peters juxtaposes decentralization versus centralization, but more importantly, he also distinguishes decentralized networks from distributed networks. He goes on to show how the mentality of a decentralized structured network was prevalent in many fields and spheres, including how roads, but also the government was set up. His argument is persuasive, but I was also left thinking about the premise of his question. Two questions come to mind: if the Soviet Union had more familiarity with distributed networks, would the internet then have succeeded? Did the internet in the United States succeed because of an existing mentality and institutional culture that was comfortable with the idea of a distributed network? I’m not sure what the answers are; partially because I don’t know any network that comes close to the distributed ideal besides the internet, partially because I’m not sure whether prior familiarity and comfort with distributed networks explains why the internet in the United States took off. In any case, it was an interesting and provocative talk. (Peters also attributes the prior important work done on this topic by MIT historian Slava Gerovitch, who has the brilliantly titled paper “InterNyet“).
I also presented; hope to blog about it in a next post. You can watch the video in the meantime.
The videos of our presentation can be downloaded and viewed on the Berkman Interactive site. It has the videos of Benjamin Mako Hill’s presentation, Ben Peters’s talk and my own presentation on Global Voices and hospitality.