Do social networks inherently support democratic values, in contrast with ideology-bound political institutions?

At the MIT Media Lab Friday, former Al Jazeera Director General Wadah Khanfar talked about what it took for the news company to reimagine itself and listen to networks during the Arab Spring. He was joined by Mohamed Nanabhay, head of New Media at Al Jazeera, who discussed their new challenge of shifting media coverage from the spectacle of protest to the politics of building a new society. [Update: a video of the talk has been posted to the Media Lab blog]

This is a writeup of today's Center for Civic Media lunch event. If you're in the Cambridge area, come join us!

Do we need a Magna Carta for the Internet? Who should create it, and what might it contain?

Rebecca McKinnon spoke at the Center for Civic Media today about her new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (TED Talk). For many years, Rebecca was the face of CNN in Beijing and Tokyo. Then she co-founded Global Voices with our director Ethan Zuckerman. More recently, she has been thinking about what it means to be a netizen, and what might be our responsibilities and rights.

In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, Editor and Cofounder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN.

If you follow news about prisoner rights, court rulings and other news about prison issues, join us for this week's Civic Lunch...

Free Civic Lunch This Week

• RSVP for our [free] lunch this week with Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News

And more civic media news this week...

"Nutrition Labels for News"

• Matt Stempeck: “Do nutrition labels even work?” A key question before testing nutrition labels for news content

Solitude on the Web

• Nathan Matias asks, Can the Internet be a place for deep personal reflection?

SOPA/PIPA

When we started telling people about our "nutrition label for the news" project, one question came up fairly frequently: “Do nutrition labels even work?”

Of course, when people ask if labels work, they implicitly mean, "Have nutritional labels prevented America from growing more obese each year?" In this case, the obvious answer is “No.”

This doesn't mean that labels don't serve their purpose, or that we don't need them to get healthier. Your political identity is shaped by many things other than where you get your news: your parents, your siblings, your childhood, your education, your workplace, or hey, maybe even your most basic morals or the type of bacteria in your belly.

I was supposed to speak on a panel about SOPA this evening with the Northeast chapters of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. It was to serve as an educational discussion for local members, but at the national level, both unions have already officially endorsed SOPA. I spent the weekend preparing remarks, but the panel has been postponed, or possibly canceled, on account of AFTRA and SAG failing to provide representatives to discuss the bill. I can only hope this is an indication that they’re reconsidering their public support of one of the least American bills to gain serious traction in Congress, as a number of other companies have done in the face of public backlash.

We sat down for a Thursday Civic lunch with Biko Baker, Executive Director of the League of Young Voters.

Like any good organizer, Biko begins with his Story of Self. He grew up in Milwaukee, WI, with a father who was a machinist and construction worker, and a mother who worked at the grocery store. He was a jock, and didn't grow into being an academic until his sophomore year at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He did his graduate work at UCLA in History, and labor. He became a researcher for the SEIU, but was also into hip hop, and got started as a party promoter on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, working with many of hip hop's biggest West Coast names, like Snoop Dogg and Xzibit. He and his fellow promoters were essentially organizing online, developing massive email and text lists and relationships without realizing this practice had a name. Biko also wrote for The Source, one of hip hop's top magazines.

Here's your breakdown of news in civic media this week...

VIDEO

Mapping Media Ecosystems
Hal Roberts, Erhardt Graeff, and Gilad Lotan

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