Round-up of Berkman Center Notes and Reflections

I have to thank the entire crew at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard for hosting me yesterday.

The room was quite full and the audience brought it. We talked about debt, identity, space, place, platforms, policy, and culture. It kept me on my toes while the incredible support of my colleagues at Microsoft Research and the Social Media Collective kept me ten feet off the ground.

To each his or her own on the whole debate about back-channels and live-tweeting academic talks. All I know is when you get smart people who are interested enough in your talk to leave their home or office to participate, the hashtag becomes a marvelous critical discourse. I had librarians, sociologists, communication scholars, theorists, practitioners, and all manner of critical thinkers parsing and synthesizing my work in real-time yesterday. This storify is lived annotation and it is marvelous.

There was also an incredible moment of social science meeting humanities. Unbeknownst to me until after the talk, an artist in the audience was transcribing my talk on canvas as I lectured! He unfurled this length of material after the Q&A while asking me a really pointed question about probability statistics of race across institutional sectors (A: when I say over-represented in for-profit colleges I am considering proportions relative to population AND enrollment in traditional not-for-profit colleges).