 You are listening to the podcast of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. We report on the leading role that new technologies play in the context of the Global Information Society, interviewing academics and industry leaders. I shall welcome Professor Urs Gasser from the Bergmann Center for Internet and Society of the Harvard Law School. Urs Gasser is teaching at the Harvard Law School at the University of St. Gallen, at the Keio University in Japan, and also in China at the Fudan University in Shanghai. And Professor Gasser is one of the very eminent professors and researchers in the field of Internet and Society. Everybody knows that the center he is leading actually is the first one ever created and established in the United States, and not somewhere else, but at the very Harvard University. So it's a great pleasure and honor for me to interview you and put you with some questions. But before I do so, I would just like to mention that Professor Gasser has published a very important and well-known book, Born Digital, and this was published in 2008. Maybe you can just give us some ideas of what is your book, and then tell us what are your basic and principal research questions and areas you are actually working on. So, please. So first of all, thank you very much for this very warm introduction and welcome. I'm delighted to be here in Berlin, and I would like to take this opportunity again to congratulate you and your colleagues to this initiative, to the foundation of this important institute. I think this was a great start, this two days conference, and I'm very much looking forward to collaborating with you and your wonderful team, who has done an amazing job here in Berlin. Born Digital actually is a book that looks into the ways in which young users, kids, are using digital technologies. The motivation was, and the working assumption was, that of course we all feel and know as researchers increasingly that the internet impacts our lives and almost all parts of our lives, be it going to school, be it in our professional environment, for our political practices, practices of civic engagement. And our very research interest for a long time has been to gain a deeper understanding of these changes to understand whether these impacts of the internet own society are just kind of temporary spikes or whether they are essentially really structural changes in the information ecosystem. And one way to better understand these and track these changes is to look at young users who are deeply immersed into this digital space, who can't even envision a life without Google and Wikipedia and YouTube and really contrast this particular population and compare this population with other populations, with the generation of my parents for instance, and crystallize some of the issues and in that way get a better approximation at least of some of the policy issues that we need to think and care about, be it from a parent's perspective, from an educational perspective or also a broader societal perspective. Did you do this more in an empirical study as a lawyer? That would be surprising. Or is it an interdisciplinary approach you have chosen? Yes, that's a very good question. I think centers like the Berkman Center and now the Humboldt Center here in the Institute here in Berlin, we are operating in interdisciplinary teams. If we study the internet, we really have to bring together the best social scientists, exclusionary biologists, law and policy people, computer scientists and so forth to really understand the internet phenomenon. And the same was true for this particular research project that led to the book that you kindly mentioned. We work together with colleagues from various disciplines. We have done lots of focus group interviews. We have done survey work. So we have used kind of mixed methods to gain a deeper understanding of these social patterns of usage of internet by young people. I must absolutely read it. I apologize that I haven't read it yet but it is just a model for how we should work, I understand. What is your actual subject, your main subject you are working on? Which questions? You need to understand the Berkman Center is, as you know, quite an operation by now after several years. So we have a lot of research projects and given my job as executive director I am involved in many of these projects. And then, of course, part of it is my personal research agenda as well. So I am happy to talk about both things but perhaps my personal interest first. Your personal interest, yes. We are just about to finalize a manuscript for an ex-book and we, again, are John Paul for you, also being the co-author of Born Digital. And this book is looking at a hardly accessible phenomenon at a glance and that is interoperability and looks at a very hard question how complex systems work together, what the benefits are of complex information and communication systems working together but also what some of the challenges and drawbacks are. So, you know, take any everyday life transaction that includes the use of digital technologies. For instance, if you were to book a flight from here from Berlin to Boston, let's say that, you would go online, you would Google or use Bing to search for the cheapest airfare, you would even have and use price comparison sites, then ultimately you would click and buy a flight, enter your frequent flyer card, if you prefer the airline, fast forward, you would call a cab, go to the airport using your mobile phone, send some text messages, check in by swiping your frequent flyer card, get on a plane, magically cross the Atlantic with, of course, a lot of technology involved and so forth. So, you can trace every step actually of such a trivial everyday experience and look at it from the systems perspective and really try to understand what kinds of systems, from reservation systems to metadata involved in comparing airfares, how do these systems need to work together in order to enable this user experience that sometimes and most of the times it's just seamless, it's just totally convenient and in other instances when something goes wrong, we experience that we shouldn't take it for granted. And so, we take stories like that, many others, disaster relief efforts is an important one, 9-11, for instance, was a very important moment of interoperability and look at these working together of systems, but not only as far as the technology is concerned, like the iPhones and the Blackberries or something like that, but really also looking at some of the upper layers. So, it turns out that ultimately, of course, technology is about human beings using this technology. So, we look at human interoperability, for instance, the role of language. We look also at organizational interoperability because quite often these take again, this example just of a simple flight to Boston from Berlin, there are many organizations that need to work together too, so there is an organizational layer and then on top of all that is also an institutional, if you will, legal and policy layer and again, these policy frameworks in this digital age and globalized world need somehow to work together, which doesn't require them to be identical, but have the right interfaces. Yeah, then many understand each other. Exactly. And many of the things we see, for instance, in terms of privacy issues, if you look at US policies and European policies are such struggles to work towards more interoperable frameworks. That's the project in short. Is the passenger data question part of your subject? Absolutely, absolutely. And that's a perfect illustration, obviously, that while these interoperable systems have huge benefits for innovation, for economic growth, also for user autonomy, they also come with throwbacks. So, there are security issues involved because now multiple systems or owners of systems have access points to your data. It comes with privacy risks for sure. There are other drawbacks or challenges such as diversity because when systems get more standardized as one way to get to more interoperability, you may lose some of the diversity. So, there are significant drawbacks too and what we try to develop in this research project and book ultimately is a theory of interoperability. When do we have good reasons as public policy makers in particular to foster interoperability as to what degree we want to have interoperability but also how do we address some of these challenges and drawbacks. So, that's the project. That's amazing. A huge project, I guess. Could I ask you another question now regarding this conference because I wonder for somebody who is a real experienced researcher in that field and you look now on what we produce, our papers here, our introductions and do you feel somewhat they will need some years to work to get the state of the art to understanding or is there approach just to ask questions and to try to get questions from others? What is your impression of the structure and the idea of this conference? Could you give me just some thoughts of this? Yeah, I'm happy to. First of all, I think it was a really good conference and my biggest hope for this conference as well as for the work that you will be doing or we will hopefully jointly be doing in this Berlin context is that we really add truly European voice conversations around some of the thorny internet issues be it the privacy, liability of intermediaries, broadband policy, countless discussions of course and I think we very much need a unique European perspective on these controversies and topics and I think already at this conference we have seen the promise of this kind of European voice which is more diverse, which is sometimes more principled, less pragmatic to a certain extent than say voices from the US or conversations we have in the US and you know may very well be in the business of building bridges between the US and also other parts of the world including of course Asian countries so I'm very hopeful and I think this was a fantastic starting point and of course at the same time we will also have the challenge as you pointed out not only to enjoy the diversity and the freshness of the perspectives but also to create links and interfaces to work that has already been going on for roughly a decade now and I think this will be a process of again creating interoperability Wonderful. We were so happy yesterday that you said that you will invite us to Berkman Centre to Harvard next year to discuss cooperation etc. If you now you will leave tomorrow I guess and is there anything in your pocket you take with you and accept the joy and happiness of us to come next year to Harvard is in substance and in ideas and kind of questions is there anything new you bring to the United States now from here except the experience that there will be a new institute many hopes of course but in substance for your work is there anything and added value for you? I certainly benefited from the conversations and many workshops I thought the contributions were really thought provoking and while sometimes it's hard to say okay what's the lesson learned or the big takeaway it still is a moment of reflection and I perceived it very much as kind of an opportunity to reflect on our own research agenda on my own work and be also challenged by some of the new perspectives that were introduced here in Berlin so I think it will resonate for quite a while this conference and certainly what will have a direct impact is the connections that we've been able to form here in Berlin we have never met in person before and it's just wonderful and you know many colleagues as well who have been here I think we had a moment of passion and some momentum to really connect the dots among individual researchers but also as you pointed out among research centers and I'm very much committed to carry forward this idea with you and your colleagues and you know I think we need it very much to increase our impact and to work hard to address some of these really challenging issues that we face as a society when it comes to the global internet I was so surprised that there's so much attention for these questions and I'm very very grateful that you came and that you participated so actively in the conference and that you invited us to America to build this kind of network and research on the very important questions internet and society poses for the future thank you very much indeed it was a great pleasure to talk with you thank you