Students, faculty and guest speakers discussed the effects of modern technology on journalism, democracy and education at "Too Much Information: Social Justice in the Age of Facebook," a two-day conference held on campus last Thursday and Friday. The event was co-sponsored by the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life; The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism; Library and Technology Services and the Student Union.

Guest speakers included Harvard Law School Prof. Charles Nesson, Author of The Big Picture: Why Democracies Need Journalistic Excellence Jeffrey Scheuer, Cornell University Director of Information Technology Policy and Law Tracy Mitrano and Director of Content at One Laptop per Child Samuel Klein.

Guest speakers shared their ideas with the audience at four of the five sessions held over the two days. At each session, the speaker was joined by a faculty and a student respondent who provided their input on the speaker's views to prompt the rest of the audience to also engage in the conversation. The fifth session contrasted student coverage of the event through blogging, live streaming and Twitter with traditional print coverage of the event by Global Communications and Operations Director Charles Radin.

Nesson, current defense attorney for Joel Tannenbaum, a Boston University graduate student found guilty of copyright infringement for downloading online music files, focused on the role of law regarding new media in the opening session moderated by Prof. Laura Miller (SOC).

The debate about the role of cyberspace in society is not over, Nesson said.

"Nobody knows exactly what [online copyright] infringement is," Nesson said, emphasized that media companies have taken advantage of this situation.

He criticized the "three strikes" policy that Internet service providers want to implement with regard to music downloading. According to the policy, once an ISP is notified three times that a user has illegally downloaded copyrighted material, the user will be banned from the Internet without a trial.

"Copyright is the civil rights issue of your generation," warned Mitrano, sharing some of Nesson's concerns in a session moderated by Prof. Andreas Teuber (PHIL) and Hoot staff writer Daniel Ortner '10.

Mitrano noted that the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement is a win for copyright holders. The settlement claims that the search engine has infringed on the copyrights of books by scanning them online and making them available through the Google Books search.

She advocated the establishment of a federal regulatory agency to monitor corporations such as Google in order to provide regularity and boundary to copyrights.

Mitrano also addressed concerns about broadcasting personal information on social networking sites such as Facebook. On the other hand, Scheuer, who considers himself "techno-skeptical from a civic standpoint," urged the audience to think critically about how information is acquired in the age of new media such as Twitter. He further stated that journalism's most important function is its role in democracy.

"Tools are knowledge," Scheuer said. He emphasized that people need to focus on the quality of citizenship journalism that has been made easy to pursue through the means of modern technology.

"New media can spread rumors also, which are the enemies of truth and hence of education, journalism and democracy," he said, citing as an example the false rumor of Harrison Ford's drowning that was spread this summer via Twitter.

However, Scheuer admitted that new media is also revolutionary and has provided the platform for journalism to reinvent itself into an independent nonprofit model.

In an interview with the Justice, Prof. Maura Jane Farrelly (JOUR), who moderated Scheuer's session along with Hoot editor Ariel Wittenberg '11, agreed that it would "be a tragedy if we fall into the trap of saying that citizen journalism needs can satisfy all of the needs that we have in a democratic society."

However, Farrelly also acknowledged that without citizenship journalism there would have been a "wall of silence" during the elections upheaval in Iran this summer, during which the mainstream press was censored.

Klein addressed whether new media has deepened the divide of communication with faculty respondent Prof. Theodore Johnson (COEX) and student respondent Danielle Myers '12.

He emphasized that sharing over the Internet has benefited knowledge and education by making information easily accessible.

Klein added that conversations with strangers, automated language translations and publishing are all made easier with the help of new media.

Yale Spector '11, Jamie Fleishman '11, Rajiv Ramakrishnan '10 and Hoot editor Samantha Shokin '12 discussed their digital media coverage of all the sessions at the student verdict event. The students said that a total of 10 participants engaged in their coverage on Twitter using the hashtag feature, which allows other Twitter users to search for and engage in a particular conversation.

Shokin typed notes on the sessions as they took place, and Fleishman was in charge of editing the notes and publishing them on the blog at http:// tmibrandeis.wordpress.com. Spector oversaw the coverage on Twitter.

"This was not easy at all. This was tough," Fleishman said.

"I've actually found [TMI to be] a really fascinating set of conversations," Miller said in an interview with the Justice. "I think, though, that what could have maybe been discussed more was actually the very title of this, 'Too Much Information,' and the ways in which the problem of too much information actually impedes the ability to draw more people into these conversations because there are too many other distractions going on."



-Miranda Neubauer contributed reporting