 Hi, my name's Ethan Zuckerman, I'm a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society here at Harvard. I'm also a fellow over at MIT's Media Lab where I work at the Center for Future Civic Media. I'm actually interested in the challenges of carving out public spaces where we can have civic dialogue within the space of privately held corporate controlled space. And so what I mean by this is probably best exemplified by what's been happening during the Arab Spring, which is to say that, well it would be a mistake to say that technologies like Facebook or YouTube are causal in understanding what's been going on in Egypt and Tunisia. They have been incredibly important both as far as finding ways for people to document their own movements and to have discussions about where we go in the future. And while this is great and laudable that these companies have made it possible to have these sorts of dialogues, there are some real tensions. There's a lot of activists who end up losing accounts within these systems. There are cases where content that's very important to share, for instance videos about police brutality, end up bumping up against concerns of terms of service. And what we end up seeing is that there's this very interesting tension. We need a network public sphere. We need digital public spaces that are accessible to lots of different people. Historically, we built those by saying, I've got a website. I'll invite you in. Come use it. That's harder and harder to do as we move forward. It's very, very hard to model something like a social network on a single server. It really requires a huge company behind it. And it can be very, very hard to keep an independent website up in the face of something like a denial of service attack. I think we're going through a moment where there's all sorts of challenging blurring of the public and the private. I think there's a strong encouragement to put aspects of your life that might previously have been private and put them into public through sharing through something like social media. At the same time, Judith Donna at this conference made the point that it's easier to be private in physical space at this moment in time than it really has been at other moments in time. It used to be that we lived in small villages. Everyone knew each other's business. I still live in one of those small villages and people do often know my business, but that's less and less common. And so while I think there's this sense that we're heading towards an overwhelming state of public, I actually think it's much more complicated than that. I think we're public in some different places. I think we may be increasingly private in some other different places. I think there's a tension that's ongoing and I think we're all trying to figure out how to navigate it. They are public in the sense that you're displaying your information. They are private in the sense that they're owned by corporations and they're governed by corporate rulesets rather than by constitutional law to the US or somewhere else. And they can be semi-public in some very blurry ways, depending on how we use them. If you speak a language other than the language that most people use, if you go on to Facebook and you speak in Ga, the language of the people of southern Ga, no one's going to read it, except other Ga speakers. So you can carve out a private space for fellow Ga's within that space, even though all your dialogue is happening in public. And people use what Dana Boyd is calling social steganography as a way to have conversations that are public and visible, but have all sorts of layers of hidden meaning behind them. But that's what I mean about trying to blur those complicated boundaries.