Ethan Zuckerman: the history of digital community, in less than 7 minutes

Fasten your time machine seatbelt. As part of the Berkman Center’s ongoing tenth anniversary celebration, Berkman@10, we’re retrieving some classics from our multimedia archive and adding them to our new YouTube channel

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To date, we’ve: re-presented Lawrence Lessig’s fall 2000 debate with Jack Valenti; brought back Charles Nesson’s framing of IS2K7, University: Knowledge Beyond Authority; re-produced John Perry Barlow's reassesment of his 1994 essay on the economy of ideas; and re-posed the question: Will the Internet draft the next president?

This week, a double hat tip -- to ROFLCon's group dissection of Internet culture and to Digital Natives' roundup of Internet video, which reminded us of this classic from the watershed first Beyond Broadcast conference...

Cambridge, MA, May 12, 2006 - Global Voices co-founder and Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman delivers a magnificent, breathless history of digital community, by way of prefacing a Beyond Broadcast panel on the community dimension of media. Reaching back to the mid-60s and ARPANET, Ethan makes a propulsive case for the foundational role of communications between people -- email, chat, MUDs, MySpace, more -- in the development of the Net. More than a quarter century after ARPANET, why do we care? Take a few minutes to find out how Ethan answers.