Media and Social Change

2011 is shaping up to be a year of profound political change, possibly on par with 1989, 1968 or 1848. One of the many unanswered questions raised by the Arab Spring, the London Riots, the Occupy Wall Street movement is the relationship between new media and social change. Ethan Zuckerman, incoming director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, will examine the relationship between social media and social change in the Arab Spring. More broadly, his talk will serve as an overview of emerging scholarship about media and the Arab Spring, and of research underway at MIT on the emerging field of civic media.

Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at MIT’s Media Lab. With Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices. Global Voices showcases news and opinions from citizen media in over 150 nations and thirty languages. Ethan’s research focuses on issues of internet freedom, civic media in the developing world and cosmopolitanism in a digital age. He blogs at http://ethanzuckerman.com/blog and lives in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

Reception immediately following in 3rd floor atrium