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
building countries economic emerge hackers kenya power ready solutions system takes time using
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.
bunch distinct global great interface less pretending sort specific
The Internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces. There's some interface between them, but there's a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.
arab job media reporting shameful
The U.S. media have done a shameful job of reporting on the Arab world.
Sometimes you need the things you didn't know you needed to know.
french translate
I can read a lot of French newspapers with Google Translate and have them read quite comfortably.
confusing world search-engine
A world where everyone creates content gets confusing pretty quickly without a good search engine.
locality
There's no locality on the web - every market is a global market.
victory substance wikipedia
Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance.
teenager communication trying
Teenagers try to hide what's really going on in their communication online.
technology understanding calling
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.
communication firsts steps
A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.
creativity imports
Creativity is an import-export business.
phones mobile-phones phenomenal
The uptake on mobile phones in Africa is phenomenal.
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.