As someone who learns in public online, I've written many hundreds of news, magazine, and literary articles, as well as many event liveblogs. My journalism has appeared in The Atlantic, the Guardian, PBS, WIRED, and FiveThirtyEight.
I frequently blog public talks to broaden public exposure to scholarly ideas and to enable transparency toward powerful people's public statements. Liveblog posts, which summarize what was said, do not reflect my personal views.
When the two of us set out on our 550-mile bicycle storytelling adventure in the footsteps of the 1966 Farmworkers March, we were chasing a legend, seeking a conversation, and trying to understand a region that will shape the shared future of our planet.
Last week, CAT Lab made a submission to the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information on this issue for their “AI Accountability Policy Request for Comment.” Here it is:
Each time a community changes a street name, adds a new class to the curriculum, or publishes in a new language, they are making a statement about who belongs.
Even as farm workers and advocacy organizations report failures, support enforcement, and push for change, people still need to be safe at work. That is the question that brought the “chingonas” of the Central Valley together that Saturday night in Fresno after a long day of work.
In the hands of Melissa Montalvo and other journalists, journalism is a mirror for a community with the majority of Fresno’s population and a minority of its power.
When Randy Villegas explains the reasons not to live in California’s Central Valley, you can tell from his urgent enthusiasm that he’s about to convince you the opposite.
Renowned as the site of labor activist Cesar Chavez’s 1968 25-day hunger strike, The Forty Acres is slated for incorporation into a national park being considered by the US government.
When Francisco Gonzales moved to the town of Arvin, California from the Los Angeles suburbs in 2005, he was captivated by the mountain vistas, the green fields, and orange trees that surround the town. “I thought it would be clean,” he said, pointing to the small housing development where he had invested his retirement savings after decades working as a handyman. Then Francisco points to the oil derrick across the street from him and shrugs.
As we cycle the route of the 1966 Farmworkers March, we’ll be interweaving history with the stories of people who are shaping the future of California’s Central Valley today.
Bicycle tours tend to prioritize exquisite landscapes, but since our ride is also a journalistic exercise, we needed to adopt a different philosophy of route-making.
When local politician Alyssa Cisneros took her daughter to Foothills Nature Preserve in Palo Alto on July 4th 2020, she was hoping to celebrate Independence Day from one of the region’s most beautiful overlooks.
When Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal, public policy, trust and safety lead, at the start of an avalanche of firings and departures, the Tesla CEO’s actions were reminiscent of another automaker in crisis. After General Motors closed its Flint, Michigan, factories in 1997, it posted signs on the empty buildings: “Demolition Means Progress.” Even if Twitter limps along after its recent self-immolation, we can expect to see more and more signs of something like urban decay on the platform. As a scientist who has studied online safety and discrimination for more than a decade, I’m deeply worried about the safety risks of half-failing infrastructure.
The post Creating a Community of Support for Trust and Safety Professionals – Charlotte Wilmer at TrustCon appeared first on Citizens and Technology Lab.
Reflections on home and place as I depart for a year at StanfordLast Saturday, I cycled from Ithaca to Chittenango and back, my last ride before moving to California for a year-long fellowship at CASBS.
Are you an engineer or data scientist working on software infrastructures and processes for independent, public-interest research on technology and society?
Marking what we have lost and what might be next. Last Month, Ed Yong asked in The Atlantic why American society and government could not or would not acknowledge the magnitude & urgency of nearly a million lives lost to COVID.
How Art Advances Tech & Policy — Chris Csikszentmihalyi at CornellHow can artists contribute to technology policy, and how can artists engage the public in shared knowledge-making about science and technology?
Academia is a place where, to use the language of sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, there is racism without racists. By that, we mean that although most people prefer to think that they or their colleagues are good people who would not intentionally discriminate, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that racism plays an important role in the structure and function of academic institutions.
Despite all of the talk about increasing diversity, it does not seem like universities have made much progress — at least when it comes to the diversity of the tenure-track and tenured faculty. With Neil Lewis Jr. and Elan Hope. Graphics by Jasmine Mithani.
We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Laura Edelson and NYU’s Cybersecurity for Democracy team, who were punished by Facebook on August 2nd for shedding light on the company’s impact on democracy (co-written with Rebekah Tromble and Susan Benesch).
How can platforms effectively combat misinformation with steps short of takedowns? As our forthcoming research demonstrates, providing warnings to users can make a big difference, but not all warnings are created equal. Article by Ben Kaiser, Jonathan Mayer, J. Nathan Matias
Focusing only on scientific advancement keeps us from addressing the kinds of problems that motivated us to pursue science in the first place, write Adam Seth Levine and J. Nathan Matias.
At our Community Research Summit, the CAT Lab team and other researchers discussed and developed studies to help Wikipedia thrive. By working alongside Wikipedians from eighteen communities – from Azerbaijani to Women in Red – we developed dozens of possible research ideas for the future.
Maybe your community has been affected by technology and you want to understand and reshape those impacts. Or you’re in the tech industry and know how few problems can be solved with engineering alone. Maybe you studied the social sciences and want to understand digital environments. Above all, you are looking for a way to create usable knowledge that matters in people’s lives.
Last Thursday, August 15, I heard for the first time about Joi Ito’s business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the ties between Epstein and the MIT Media Lab, which occurred after his appalling crimes were already known. In my research, I study ways to protect women and other vulnerable people online from abuse and harassment. I cannot with integrity do that from a place with the kind of relationship that the Media Lab has had with Epstein. It’s that simple. Read more about my decision in this post.
Why I’m excited to start as an assistant professor and what it means for the research nonprofit I startedDuring my academic job search, I have been reflecting on the tremendous opportunity and responsibility for faculty to contribute to society, scholarship, and students (read more here).
In a time when U.S. tech employees are organizing against corporate-military collaborations on AI, how can the ethics and incentives of military, corporate, and academic research be more closely aligned on AI and lethal autonomous weapons?
Online platforms, which monitor and intervene in the lives of billions of people, routinely host thousands of experiments to evaluate policies, test products, and contribute to theory in the social sciences.
Smart contracts are powerful virtual referees for holding money and carrying out agreed-on procedures in cases of disputes, but they can’t guarantee privacy and have strict scalability limitations.
I believe my best contribution to a flourishing internet is through public-interest research and teaching in a university settingAs society discovers the power and risks from digital communications, how can democracies manage this power for the common good?
Memories aren’t made to last. With no apologies to Journey, and much gratitude to TheInspiroBot, Rochelle LaPlante, Andromeda Yelton, Caroline Sinders, Sydette Harry, Renee Teate, Gina Neff, and Andrew Losowsky, for egging me on last July.
Since writing this, I’ve supported a field experiment on this question, and I now think the jury’s out on the effect of downvoting on conflict and behavior.
This Monday, Nikki Bourassa and I organized a van from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society to visit the American Museum of Tort Law, which I have decided to call the American Museum of Exploding Cars and Toys that Kill You.
Law enforcement sometimes argue that they need backdoors to encryption in order to carry out their mission, while cryptographers like Bruce Schneier describe the public cybersecurity risk from backdoors and say that the “technology just doesn’t work that way.
As latino communities face increased pressure and risks from US immigrations and customs, how are latinos of faith organizing to protect the vulnerable while also including white Christians in migrant-led efforts for change?
Today at the MIT Media Lab’s Defiance conference, Jonathan Zittrain facilitated a conversation about the story of Galileo and what it means for our understanding of research and activism that violates deeply-held boundaries.
How is the FBI thinking about its relationship with bio hacking communities as they attempt to support innovation while also limit the risks from DIY biotech?
James Berri traveled three hours to Sacramento earlier this month for his first Pride parade, one of hundreds of annual LGBTQ celebrations across America.
Online harassment has been an enduring and evolving social concern for over 40 years, yet many of the most urgent empirical questions for public well-being and freedom remain unexplored.
Facebook, you may have noticed, turned into a rainbow-drenched spectacle following the Supreme Court’s decision Friday that same-sex marriage is a Constitutional right.
Reading Through the creatures Thou hast made Show the brightness of Thy glory, Be eternal Truth displayed In their substance transitory, Till green Earth and Ocean hoary, Massy rock and tender blade Tell the same unending story — “We are Truth.
For the past three years, I’ve been using methods to identify gender in large datasets to support research, design, and data journalism, supported by the Knight Foundation, with an amazing group of collaborators.
In celebration of Banned Book Month at @1book140, join our Twitter book club to read the classic sci-fi fantasy novel and illicit classic A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
Join our Twitter book club to read the graphic memoir Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, one of more than 20 fantastic nominations for our LGBTQ month at @1book140.
How do our designs change when we start emphasizing people and community and not just the things they do for us? Over the next year of my research, I’m exploring acknowledgment and gratitude, basic parts of online relationships that designers often set aside to focus on the tasks people do online.
After a month of discussion on healthy, ethical food at #1book140, our Twitter book club’s July pick is a dystopian fast-food space comedy with A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World by Rachel Cantor.
Middlemarch, by George Eliot, has been called “the greatest English novel,” labeled “the death knell for a book club,” and, according to Virginia Woolf, who loved it, “one of the few novels written for grown-up people.
Transitions in literary style from romanticism to realism in the late 19th century inflict finely calibrated essay agony on English students worldwide.
Penguin”From the day my novel was published, I realised that now and forever more I was to be branded as the spy turned writer, rather than as a writer who, like scores of his kind, had done a stint in the secret world, and written about it.
New Press, Houghton Mifflin, Penguin, Harper Collins, Knopf, Random HouseFrom parties to prisons, narratives of a single place or remarkable journeys, the past year at our Twitter book club, @1book140, has sparked great conversations.
Random House; Harper Perennial; PenguinNovember is our month for the complex ethics of secrets, surveillance, and intrigue at @1book140, The Atlantic’s Twitter book club.
Around the world, an emerging group of language activists are recognizing that participatory digital media can play a part in engaging and encouraging the next generation of speakers of endangered and indigenous languages.
Jillian York (Global Voices and Electronic Frontier Foundation) starts off this session by asking participants if they think their government is monitoring their electronic communications.
If anything sums up this year’s MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, it was MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito’s argument for creativity and risk, encouraging us to pursue visions that we do not yet know how to describe.