RM How are people using technology—
rather than, say, lobbying for laws
to be passed—to force change in
new ways?
EZ We used to make change mostly
using law as our primary lever. Now
we use the legal lever less; we use
the levers of norms of markets and
technology more often. #Me Too is
an example of a norms-based campaign. It’s basically saying, “We’re
going to challenge how people talk
about sexual assault and sexual
harassment.” And once we change
that norm, there’s other legal pieces,
market pieces, that’ll come into play.
But at its heart it’s trying to change
how we have certain conversations.
The point in all of these is that if you
can’t get social change done through
the traditional model of civics, there
is a whole new set of tools, and people are starting to learn how to use
these things.
RM But social networks like Facebook
and Twitter control, or at least
direct, the information we see by
using algorithms to filter what we
see in our feed. You worked with
two colleagues—Chelsea Barabas
of MIT’s Center for Civic Media and
Neha Narula at the Media Lab—to
build a tool called Gobo that lets
people aggregate and filter their
feeds on their own. Why?
EZ What this is meant to do is to say,
“Look, it’s really a mistake to give
one or two companies control
over our digital public sphere.”
Instead, we need competing platforms. We’re trying to make the
case that you want those di;erent social networks because you
want more control over your filters
about what you see and what you
don’t see.
If we need competing platforms, we need tools that would let
us use those competing platforms.
Gobo is one of those tools. Gobo is
an aggregator. It aggregates Twitter and the “aggregateable” parts of
Facebook—the public pages.
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
VOL. ;;; | NO. ;
Q+A
In the past, if you wanted to change the world, you had to pass a law or
start a war. Now you create a hashtag. Ethan Zuckerman studies how
people change the world, or attempt to, by using social media or other
technological means. As director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT
and an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, he tries to help his
students make sense of these issues. Zuckerman is also writing a book
about civic engagement during a time when we have a lot less trust in
institutions—government, businesses, banks, and so on. Maybe that
lack of trust is reasonable. After all, we’ve spent the last decade-plus
slowly turning our data over to large corporations like Facebook and
Google without quite realizing we were doing it. Zuckerman knows
what it’s like to build technology that pisses a lot of people o;. Back in
the 1990s he created what became one of the most hated objects on
the internet: the pop-up ad. The aim was to show an ad on a web page
without making it look as though the advertiser necessarily endorsed
the content on the page. “Our intentions,” he later wrote in an apology
to the internet at large, “were good.” Zuckerman spoke with MIT
Technology Review about how social media started controlling us rather
than the other way around.
By Rachel Metz
Ethan Zuckerman
