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Sketchbook page from last night's Zittrain lecture
In the first of many blogging experiments, and to minimize the amount of time I spend at my computer this semester – not to mention to hone my cartooning skills – I’m going to post pages from my sketchbook from some of the lectures I attend this semester. Last night’s was part of the Liberation Technology series and featured Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain discussing the ethical pitfalls and perils of crowdsourced jobs – especially ones that seem innocuous at first but actually have nefarious goals. Such as what if the Iranian government (whose involvement would obviously be kept hidden) attempted to identify protestors at a rally by building an entertaining face-matching game, or companies luring “turkers” (from Amazon’s now notorious “mechanical turk” site) to provide bogus product reviews for points or minimal (3-5 cents) return.
We are all complicit when the promise of fake online points prompts gamers to overlook their ethical responsibility to society – check out this so-sinister-it’s-laughable true story of an anti-Health Reform Organization bribing facebook game players with points to send an email to their member of congress decrying the evils of Health Care reform. In a beautiful instance of technology spawning some great metaphorical neologisms, this process is called astroturfing – because it’s fake grass roots campaigning.
Find out more about Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it, here.
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