Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness
Feeling like the world is becoming less friendly? Social theorist Jonathan Zittrain begs to difffer. The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust.
Jonathan Zittrain wants to make sure the electronic frontier stays open -- and he's looking to the Internet's millions of users for its salvation.
The increasing proliferation of "tethered" devices, from iPhones to Xboxes, is only one of countless threats to the freewheeling Internet as we know it. There's also spam, malware, misguided legislation and a drift away from what Internet law expert Jonathan Zittrain calls "generativity" -- a system's receptivity to unanticipated (and innovative) change instigated by myriad users.
Harvard law professor Zittrain, as an investigator for the OpenNet initiative and co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has long studied the legal, technological and world-shaking aspects of quickly morphing virtual terrains. He performed the first large-scale tests of Internet filtering in China and Saudi Arabia in 2002. His initiatives include projects to fight malware (StopBadware) and ChillingEffects, a site designed to support open content by tracking legal threats to individual users.
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