Some weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Hyperpublic symposium hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and assumed the challenge, together with other interns at the Youth and Media (YAM) Lab, of documenting the event with different media such as photographs, videos, mind maps, and tweets. The symposium helped us to understand in a more complex way, how privacy and public space are being re-designed in our digital networked society. The diversity of voices and points of view demonstrated that the rapid changes we are experimenting as society are better understood when we create a dialogue between different disciplines and bring together different perspectives. It is precisely that variety of points of view what we tried to capture when we were documenting the symposium.
Today, I have the pleasure to announce the release of the first batch of short video clips about Hyperpublic (12 short video interviews) that we have produced in the YAM lab. These videos are based on personal interviews we conducted with several speakers and attendees. We invited them to share with us, during the short coffee breaks and in the private location of an empty classroom in the Maxwell Building, their impressions from the symposium and their insights on the themes of privacy and public space. They answered open ended questions such as, How do they see the boundaries between the private and the public?, How does the symposium changed the ways in which they think about private/public?, What is the biggest insight they have had during the sessions?, and How do they imagine the future of private and public?. Furthermore, some of the interviewees also answered some specific questions related to their areas of expertise. For example, danah boyd talked to us about the strategies teenagers use in networked public spheres, Paul Dourish talked about the use of GPS devices for discovering public spaces, and Julia Scher spoke about architectures of surveillance and performance.
Although each of the 12 short video interviews we are making public today portrays one interviewee at a time, they are intended to resonate with each other (Urs Gasser, Paul Dourish, Mica Pollock, Laurent Pollock, Laurent Stalder, Julia Scher, Jesse Shapins, Jeffrey Schanapp, Herbert Burket, Ethan Zuckerman, danah boyd, Charles Nesson, Adam Greenfield). We edited them short (3-4 minutes) so people can watch several of them through the Berkman YouTube Channel and get an idea of how different perspectives were brought together to the symposium, and what was the significance of it. In the following weeks, we will release a second batch of videos produced by the YAM Lab. We are working in a remix of the 12 interviews, a sort of mash-up video that combines quotations from the different speakers and that explores in a more direct way the interdisciplinary approach of the Hyperpubic symposium.
Finally, as the producer of these videos, I would like to credit the Youth and Media Lab interns that collaborated in their making. Alex O’Dell and Kassra Homaifar created the introductory sequence using photographs and music with Creative Commons licenses (CC-By-SA and CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). Claire Kwong, Hannah Deresiewicz, Alex, and me worked as editors.
