Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He is the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and the author most recently of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which won the Zócalo Book Prize...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
CountryUnited States of America
practice average common
Re-tweeting is a pretty common practice on Twitter, but on an average day, we see maybe one out of 20 posts is a re-tweet.
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The uptake on mobile phones in Africa is phenomenal.
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A world where everyone creates content gets confusing pretty quickly without a good search engine.
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Creativity is an import-export business.
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A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.
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The term 'cyberutopian' tends to be used only in the context of critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has an unrealistic and naively overinflated sense of what technology makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that govern societies.
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Teenagers try to hide what's really going on in their communication online.
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On Twitter, if you want to quote someone else, you say, 'RT, re-tweet, that person's name, and then what they said before.' And it's a way of essentially saying, 'I'm not saying this, but my friend said this and I thought this was interesting.'
speech levels censorship
While the Internet is censored in China, the censorship is allowing a level of speech to take place that's unprecedented.
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[According to Twitter] 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population.
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For countries such as Kenya to emerge as economic powerhouses, they need better infrastructure: roads, ports, smart grids and power plants. Infrastructure is expensive, and takes a long time to build. In the meantime, hackers are building 'grassroots infrastructure,' using the mobile-phone system to build solutions that are ready for market.
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When you sign up for Facebook, the service first searches for any mentions of your name and suggests you befriend anyone who has mentioned you in their posts. It then asks to access your e-mail account so you can connect with anyone with whom you regularly correspond.
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On the Internet, information from Indiana and India is equally cheap and easy to access.
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It's my fond hope that social networks such as Facebook will help users broaden their perspectives by listening to a different set of people than they encounter in their daily life. But I fear services such as Facebook may be turning us into imaginary cosmopolitans.