How Wide a Web ~ Media Cloud Mapping & More

Very good to see Ethan Zuckerman again at MIT, today kicking off the Media Lab's Colloquium series with a talk on How Wide a Web. Co-founder of Tripod, Geekcorps, and more recently Global Voices, Ethan is a research fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center whose personal blog My Heart's in Accra… continues to delight. He's especially interested in how civic media can address deep biases in mass media, including something he called imaginary cosmopolitanism today. Just because we have potential access to blogs and newspapers and online reportage from around our planet at the click of a button does not mean that much if any attention is actually paid to such streams. Mapping the facts of human media consumption, experimenting and intervening, and ideally catalyzing new innovations in global media are high on his research agenda, including his prime current project, Media Cloud, a platform for the quantitative study of online media. Great stuff!