Ethan Zuckerman

Last updated
Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman (48278826342) (cropped).jpg
Zuckerman in 2019
Born (1973-01-04) January 4, 1973 (age 51)
Nationality American
Education Williams College (BA)
OccupationMedia scholar
Scientific career
Notable students Joy Buolamwini [1]
Website ethanzuckerman.com

Ethan Zuckerman (born January 4, 1973) [2] is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT [3] until May 2020, [4] and the author of the 2013 book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which won the Zócalo Book Prize. [5] In 2020, he became an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts. [6]

Contents

Education

Zuckerman is a graduate of Williams College, where he received a B.A. in Philosophy in 1993. [7] He then spent a year on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Legon, Ghana and the National Theatre of Ghana in Accra, where he studied ethnomusicology and percussion. [7]

Career

Zuckerman was one of the first staff members of Tripod.com, one of the first successful "dot com" enterprises, where he worked from 1994 to 1999. There, he was in charge of the design and the implementation of the website, which at that time marketed content and services to recent college graduates. The business model of this website was exclusively based on advertising. After one of the website's major advertisers complained that one of their banner advertisements had appeared on a page that celebrated anal sex, Zuckerman imagined a way to associate an ad with a user's page without putting it directly on the page. His solution was to open a new dedicated window with only the ad in it. While Zuckerman claims having only written the code to open a new window, he is credited as the inventor of the pop-up ad. [8]

In 2000, he founded Geekcorps [2] and 2004, Global Voices [9] where he sits on its board. [10]

He won the MIT Technology Review "Technology in the Service of Humanity" award in 2002 for his work on Geekcorps. [11] Zuckerman has been a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he is also a long-time fellow. His work at the Berkman Center has included research into global media attention, [12] [13] as well as the co-founding of Global Voices in collaboration with Rebecca MacKinnon. For some years he was also a contributing writer for Worldchanging.com, where he served as president of the board of directors.

In January 2007, he joined the inaugural Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board.

In 2008, he coined the cute cat theory of digital activism.[ citation needed ]

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers, in which he stated the Best idea is "The world isn't flat and globalization is only beginning, which means we have time to change what we're doing and get it right". [14] Also in September of that year, he became the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media. [15]

Zuckerman was an Open Society Global Board member, and also sits on the board of directors of Ushahidi, [16] Global Voices, [17] and the Ghanaian journalism training nonprofit, PenPlusBytes. [18]

He was interviewed in the 2015 web documentary about internet privacy, Do Not Track . [19]

On July 1, 2016, Zuckerman was appointed Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. [3]

In 2019, revelations of Media Lab director Joi Ito's connections with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender, shed light on the extent of monetary gifts from Epstein to the Media Lab and Ito's startups outside of MIT. Zuckerman resigned from his position [20] as director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, in protest of the Media Lab's involvement with Epstein. [21] He joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in April 2020. [6] [22]

In 2024 Zuckerman, in his academic role, brought a suit, represented by lawyers from Knight First Amendment Institute, for declaratory relief under section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act. He proposed to use a piece of software similar to Unfollow Everything to evaluate user response to having control of their social media feeds. [23]

Personal life

Zuckerman resides[ when? ] in Lanesborough, Massachusetts, and has a son with Rachel Barenblat. [24] On October 7, 2022, Zuckerman married Amy Price. [25]

Works by Zuckerman

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Zittrain</span> American law professor (born 1969)

Jonathan L. Zittrain is an American professor of Internet law and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and co-founder and director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Previously, Zittrain was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting professor at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School. He is the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It as well as co-editor of the books, Access Denied, Access Controlled, and Access Contested.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joi Ito</span> Japanese-American activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist

Joichi "Joi" Ito is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the President of Chiba Institute of Technology. He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at Harvard Law School. Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan. Ito is general partner of Neoteny Labs, and former board member of Creative Commons, The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The New York Times Company, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, The Open Source Initiative, and Sony Corporation. Ito wrote a monthly column in the Ideas section of Wired.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geekcorps</span> Non-profit organization

Geekcorps is a non-profit organization that sends people with technical skills to developing countries to assist in computer infrastructure development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society</span> Research center at Harvard University

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of Harvard University as a whole. It is named after the Berkman family. On July 5, 2016, the center added "Klein" to its name following a gift of $15 million from Michael R. Klein.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Palfrey</span> US law professor

John Gorham Palfrey VII is an American educator, scholar, and law professor. He is an authority on the legal aspects of emerging media and an advocate for Internet freedom, including increased online transparency and accountability as well as child safety. In March 2019, he was named the president of the MacArthur Foundation effective September 1, 2019. Palfrey was the 15th Head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 2012 to 2019. He has been an important figure at Harvard Law School and served as executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society from 2002 to 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Mako Hill</span> Debian hacker, intellectual property researcher, activist and author

Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and The Official Ubuntu Book.

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) was a joint project whose goal was to monitor and report on internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. Started in 2002, the project employed a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run internet filtering programs. Participating academic institutions included the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at University of Oxford; and, The SecDev Group, which took over from the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebecca MacKinnon</span> American activist and journalist

Rebecca MacKinnon is an author, researcher, Internet freedom advocate, and co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices. She is notable as a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She is on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative the founding director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, and is the Vice President for Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Global Voices is an international community of writers, bloggers and digital activists that aim to translate and report on what is being said in citizen media worldwide. It is a non-profit project started at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School that grew out of an international bloggers' meeting held in December 2004. The organization was founded by Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon. In 2008, it became an independent non-profit incorporated in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Ushahidi is an open source software application which utilises user-generated reports to collate and map data. It uses the concept of crowdsourcing serving as an initial model for what has been coined as "activist mapping" – the combination of social activism, citizen journalism and geographic information. Ushahidi allows local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the Internet, creating an archive of events with geographic and time-date information. The Ushahidi platform is often used for crisis response, human rights reporting, and election monitoring. Ushahidi was created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election that collected eyewitness reports of violence reported by email and text message and placed them on a Google Maps map.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Weinberger</span> American philosopher (1950-)

David Weinberger is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the effect of machine learning’s complex models on business strategy and sense of meaning; order and organization in the digital age; the networking of knowledge; the Net's effect on core concepts of self and place; and the shifts in relationships between businesses and their markets.

The NEXA Center for Internet & Society is a research center founded at the Department of Control and Computer Engineering of Polytechnic University of Turin. It is an academic research center which studies the Internet with a multidisciplinary approach: technical, legal and economic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jillian York</span> American activist, journalist and travel writer (born 1982)

Jillian C. York is an American free-expression activist and author. She serves as Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and a founding member of Deep Lab. She is the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism and Morocco - Culture Smart!: the essential guide to customs & culture.

Esra'a Al Shafei is a Bahraini civil rights activist, blogger, and the founder and executive director of Majal and its related projects, including CrowdVoice.org. Al Shafei is a senior TED Fellow, an Echoing Green fellow, and has been referred to by CNN reporter George Webster as "An outspoken defender of free speech". She has been featured in Fast Company magazine as one of the "100 Most Creative People in Business." In 2011, The Daily Beast listed Al Shafei as one of the 17 bravest bloggers worldwide. She is also a promoter of music as a means of social change, and founded Mideast Tunes, which is currently the largest platform for underground musicians in the Middle East and North Africa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ultrasurf</span>

UltraSurf is a freeware Internet censorship circumvention product created by UltraReach Internet Corporation. The software bypasses Internet censorship and firewalls using an HTTP proxy server, and employs encryption protocols for privacy.

The MIT Center for Civic Media was a research and practical center that developed and implemented tools that supported political action and "the information needs of [civic] communities". Its mission read in part:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Media Cloud</span>

Media Cloud is an open-source content analysis tool that aims to map news media coverage of current events. It "performs five basic functions -- media definition, crawling, text extraction, word vectoring, and analysis." Media cloud "tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database ... enable[s] researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered." Media Cloud was developed by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and launched in March 2009. It's distributed under the GNU GPL 3+.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Juliana Rotich</span> Kenyan informatician

Juliana Rotich is a Kenyan information technology professional, who has developed web tools for crowdsourcing crisis information and coverage of topics related to the environment. She is the co-founder of iHub, a collective tech space in Nairobi, Kenya, and of Ushahidi, open-source software for collecting and mapping information. She is a TED Senior Fellow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nawaat</span>

Nawaat is an independent collective blog co-founded by Tunisians Sami Ben Gharbia, Sufian Guerfali and Riadh Guerfali in 2004, with Malek Khadraoui joining the organization in 2006. The goal of Nawaat's founders was to provide a public platform for Tunisian dissident voices and debates. Nawaat aggregates articles, visual media, and other data from a variety of sources to provide a forum for citizen journalists to express their opinions on current events. The site does not receive any donations from political parties. During the events leading to the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, Nawaat advised Internet users in Tunisia and other Arab nations about the dangers of being identified online and offered advice about circumventing censorship. Nawaat is an Arabic word meaning core. Nawaat has received numerous awards from international media organizations in the wake of the Arab Spring wave of revolutions throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cute cat theory of digital activism</span> Activist uses of the Internet aided and protected by self-interested functions

The cute cat theory of digital activism is a theory concerning Internet activism, Web censorship, and "cute cats" developed by Ethan Zuckerman in 2008. It posits that most people are not interested in activism; instead, they want to use the web for mundane activities, including surfing for pornography and lolcats. The tools that they develop for that are very useful to social movement activists because they may lack resources to develop dedicated tools themselves. This, in turn, makes the activists more immune to reprisals by governments than if they were using a dedicated activism platform, because shutting down a popular public platform provokes a larger public outcry than shutting down an obscure one.

References

  1. ↑ Buolamwini, Joy Adowaa (2017). Gender shades : intersectional phenotypic and demographic evaluation of face datasets and gender classifiers. dspace.mit.edu (MA thesis). MIT. hdl:1721.1/114068. OCLC   1026503582. Lock-green.svg
  2. 1 2 Boutin, Paul (August 2000). "Visualize World Geeks". Wired . Vol. 8, no. 8. Ethan Zuckerman ... the high-energy 27-year-old ..."
  3. 1 2 "Ethan Zuckerman Appointed Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences". MIT Media Lab. July 1, 2016. Archived from the original on October 4, 2017. Retrieved December 3, 2016.
  4. ↑ "On me, and the Media Lab | … My heart's in Accra". August 21, 2019. Retrieved July 30, 2020.
  5. ↑ "Ethan Zuckerman Wins Zócalo's Fourth Annual Book Prize". Zócalo Public Square. April 3, 2014.
  6. 1 2 "Internet Pioneer Ethan Zuckerman Named to Interdisciplinary Faculty Appointment at UMass Amherst". Office of News & Media Relations | UMass Amherst. Retrieved July 30, 2020.
  7. 1 2 "Ethan Zuckerman". Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University . Retrieved October 10, 2014.
  8. ↑ Zuckerman, Ethan (August 14, 2014). "The Internet's Original Sin: It's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web". The Atlantic. Retrieved August 20, 2014.
  9. ↑ Zuckerman, Ethan. "Ethan Zuckerman | Berkman Center". Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Retrieved April 22, 2006.
  10. ↑ "Board · Global Voices". Global Voices. Retrieved April 9, 2022.
  11. ↑ "2002 TR100". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved July 30, 2020.
  12. ↑ Zuckerman, E. (2004). "Global Attention Profiles - A Working Paper: First Steps Towards a Quantitative Approach to the Study of Media Attention". doi:10.2139/ssrn.487943. S2CID   34696767.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  13. ↑ Zuckerman, E. (2007). "Meet the bridgebloggers". Public Choice. 134 (1–2): 47–65. doi:10.1007/s11127-007-9200-y. S2CID   55806852.
  14. ↑ "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers". Foreign Policy. November 28, 2011. Archived from the original on April 16, 2012. Retrieved April 14, 2012.
  15. ↑ "Ethan Zuckerman, cyberscholar and activist, to lead MIT Center for Civic Media". MIT News. June 30, 2011. Retrieved August 20, 2014.
  16. ↑ "Board of Directors". ushahidi.com. Archived from the original on April 19, 2012. Retrieved April 16, 2012.
  17. ↑ "Board of Directors". globalvoices.org. Retrieved April 16, 2012.
  18. ↑ "About Penplusbytes: Board of Directors". penplusbytes.org. Archived from the original on July 27, 2013. Retrieved April 16, 2012.
  19. ↑ Davis, Nicola (April 14, 2015). "Do Not Track: an online, interactive documentary about who's watching you". The Guardian. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
  20. ↑ Zuckerman, Ethan (August 21, 2019). "On me, and the Media Lab". Medium.
  21. ↑ "Head of MIT Media Lab faces crisis that tears at lab he helped elevate - The Boston Globe". BostonGlobe.com.
  22. ↑ "Next steps | … My heart's in Accra". April 28, 2020. Retrieved July 30, 2020.
  23. ↑ https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/66018/why-im-suing-facebook-in-us-federal-court
  24. ↑ Clatworthy, Ben. "Meet the man who invented pop-up ads". The Times . ISSN   0140-0460 . Retrieved April 9, 2022.
  25. ↑ Zuckerman, Ethan (October 22, 2022). "Our wedding, October 7-9, 2022" . Retrieved November 16, 2022.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.