In the coming weeks, we will be releasing videos, audio, visualizations, and other outputs from “Hyper-Public: A Symposium on Designing Privacy and Public Space,” which took place on June 10th at Harvard University.
Hyper-Public brought together computer scientists, ethnographers, architects, historians, artists and legal scholars to discuss how design influences privacy and public space, how it shapes and is shaped by human behavior and experience, and how it can cultivate norms such as tolerance and diversity.
As the first post in our series of recaps, we have collected:
(1) Urs Gasser, Judith Donath, and Jef Huang’s introduction:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/q79szTlxuPI" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
(2) John Palfrey’s comments from the session on “Delineating Public & Private”:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/HmSr3nt8VBM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
(3) danah boyd’s talk from the session on “Experience & Recreation”:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/bdLCKdjClFw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
(4) Adam Greenfield’s inputs from the session on “The Risks and Beauty
of the Hyper-Public Life”:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/7C9kgLDxCS4" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
More videos from the conference will follow in the coming weeks.
(5) A few members of the Berkman Youth and Media team also put together a visual map of some of the difficult questions and challenges associated with speakers’ provocations:
A longer description and reflection can be found on the HyperPublic blog
Additionally, Joyce Neys of the Youth and Media team reflected on the conference created a wordle from the tweet stream of the event:
The symposium was attended by much more than its 120 real life visitors as over 3000 tweets by more than 3200 unique twitterers* were thrown into the public arena hashtagged #hyperpublic. The conference was even briefly trending in the Boston area. … The Wordle cloud of the symposium’s tweets gives a nice visual summary of the main debate showing that privacy (concerns) dominated the conversation
online as well, followed closely by public versus private discussions and definitions.
As pre-inputs to the conference, David Weinberger, Judith Donath, and Wendy Seltzer offered inputs on various dimensions of the symposium’s framing:
- David Weinberger: Rebooting Library Privacy in the Age of the Network
- Judith Donath: Invisible Walls and All-Seeing Eyes
- Wendy Seltzer: Privacy, Attention, and Political Community
As an introduction to the conference, Berkman’s Executive Director Urs Gasser offered substantive opening remarks, invoking the example of Google’s StreetView to highlight some of the legal, policy, and social tensions in designing privacy and public space.
During the event, Berkman community members David Weinberger and Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged many of the discussions that took place during the day:
via Ethan:
- Walls and thresholds – physical metaphors at Hyper-public
- Latanya Sweeney and rethinking transparency
- Data, the city and the public object
- Hubert Burkert – moving beyond the metaphor
- Charlie Nesson and a new vision of the public domain
- Martin Nowak and the mathematics of cooperation
via David:
- Judith Donath’s Introduction
- Session I: Delineating Public and Private
- Session II: Experience & Recreation
- Session III: The Risks and Beauty of Hyper-Public Life
- Herbert Burkert
- Final panel: Cooperation without Coercion
The Harvard Gazette also offered a synopsis of the day’s proceedings.
We encourage you to follow along with are roundups by subscribing to the HyperPublic blog, our Berkman Buzz and Weekly Events+Digital Media newsletters, and keeping an eye on the Berkman front page.
