Reimagine the Internet Day One

Reimagine the Internet is a virtual conference co-hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the soon-to-be-launched Initiative on Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In six sessions over five days, there will be more than a dozen speakers whose work hints at what the internet could become over the next decade.

As the internet has become an inescapable part of our commercial, social, and civic lives, the flaws and harms of the contemporary internet have become increasingly apparent. Despite rhetoric of decentralization, monopolies and points of control have arisen online, and powerful corporations have largely unregulated power over vast swaths of speech and commerce. The spaces these corporations have built may be having significant negative effects on our democracies, leading towards political polarization, the spread of mis/disinformation, and the growth of politically influential conspiracy theories.

While there is robust debate about what social ills can be traced to decisions made by commercial actors, the discussion over what’s to be done is often circumscribed. We debate how platforms like Facebook and YouTube should be regulated to be less harmful, but the conversation rarely extends to questions about how we could design new internet spaces that could lead towards healthier discussions, communities, and societies. “Reimagine the Internet” is an event designed to spark some of these conversations and to feature some of the most promising efforts in this direction.

Pioneering Alternative Models for Community on the Internet
Knight Institute Visiting Research Scholar Ethan Zuckerman will speak about digital public infrastructure and his work to build social media spaces that are self-governing and civically focused. He will be joined by Katherine Maher who will talk about the ways in which Wikimedia has created an alternative model for online spaces and the ways in which it has fallen short. She will also discuss lessons the rest of the web might take from the Wikimedia experiment.

Introduction and Moderator
Katy Glenn Bass, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University

Panelists
Ethan Zuckerman, Initiative on Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University

Katherine Maher, Wikimedia Foundation

Видео Reimagine the Internet Day One канала Knight First Amendment Institute