Cybersecurity & Public Policy Lecture: “Reimagining Social Media“ with Ethan Zuckerman Event Logo

Cybersecurity & Public Policy Lecture: "Reimagining Social Media" with Ethan Zuckerman

by myFletcher

Lecture/Speaker Lecture Cyber Technology

Wed, Sep 29, 2021

12 PM – 1:30 PM EDT (GMT-4)

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The power of social media to affect politics, social change and even to provoke violence has become increasingly clear in the last few years. As we consider the power of social media and its many problems, many are proposing regulations of online speech by governments or demanding platforms take more responsibility for speech they host. This talk explores a different alternative: what if, instead of fixing existing social media platforms, we imagined and built social media designed to help us become better friends, neighbors and citizens? While such a project sounds impossibly idealistic, it's well underway, and may change the social media landscape more quickly than we would expect.

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Ethan Zuckerman's profile photo

Ethan Zuckerman

Associate Professor of Public Policy, Information and Communication and Founder of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure

University of Masschusetts, Amherst

Ethan Zuckerman is associate professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the use of new media technologies by activists and alternative business and governance models for the internet. He is the author of Mistrust: How Losing Trust in Institutions Provides Tools to Transform Them (2021) and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013). With Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices. It showcases news and opinions from citizen media in more than 150 nations and 30 languages, publishing editions in 20 languages. Previously, Zuckerman directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT and taught at the MIT Media Lab. In 2000, Zuckerman founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer organization that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. Previously, he helped found Tripod.com, one of the web's first "personal publishing" sites. He and his family live in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts.