Meet new professor Ethan Zuckerman!
By Grace Keller and Gabby Grondalski
“For me, it’s almost like traveling to unfamiliar cities and walking around. You never know when you’re going to turn the corner and find that beautiful fountain or the noodle shop or the photo you’ll take that will hang on your wall for 20 years. Research is like that for me.” – Zuckerman
Meet Ethan Zuckerman, one of UMass’s newest associate professors! At UMass, Zuckerman’s ‘home-base’ will be split between the School of Public Policy, the Department of Communication, and the College of Information and Computer Sciences. He likes “to dip into a lot of different fields and try to find unexpected connections between them.” Zuckerman is the director of the newly-opened Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure. This new research center studies the civic and social role of internet platforms. This semester, Zuckerman is teaching a course called Fixing Social Media, for Public Policy, Communication, and CICS graduate students. This course is a project-based seminar where students will work in multifunctional teams to develop ideas for internet betterment.
Zuckerman grew up in Westchester County, NY, and moved to the Berkshires to attend Williams College for his undergraduate degree. At Williams, he was working toward a contract major and was writing a thesis on rational thought but eventually ended up with a degree in Philosophy. At school, he fell in love with Western Massachusetts and has resided here ever since.
Before coming to UMass, Zuckerman worked at Harvard and MIT. At MIT, he served as director of the Center for Civic Media and associate professor of practice in media arts and sciences at the Media Lab. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the role of technology in international development, and the use of new media technologies by activists. Zuckerman decided to come to UMass for many reasons, including his desire to work at a state university and with a wide range of people. “I think it is so important that we consider education to be a public good and that we think about education as something that everybody has a right to.” He knew of extraordinary minds at UMass, “the CICS people are doing wonderful work and the young communication scholars I follow are at UMass. The work I am doing now has strong economic and public policy implications and UMass has a remarkable track record in economics.”
In 2003, Zuckerman joined the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. During his time as a fellow, his co-worker made many interesting arguments around blogging and how it would transfer journalism and writing. Zuckerman’s curiosity led him to begin blogging, and in 2004 he co-founded Global Voices, a nonprofit organization made up of primarily multilingual and international volunteers who are writers, translators, academics, and human rights activists. Together, the volunteers work to help change the way we see and understand what’s going on in countries that are rarely in the news by leveraging the power of the Internet.
Along with authoring numerous academic articles and writing many blogs, Zuckerman has also published two books. Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection explores how some users are ‘rewiring’ their media consumption and production to build connections internationally and broadening their worldviews in the process. Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them explores how people use social media and other technologies to make social change.
Learning about new topics is what Zuckerman loves to do. “The thing I love most about research is going down rabbit holes. I’m the kind of person that if I had time in a library, I’d entertain myself endlessly, just reading on topics that I was interested in.” While at UMass, Zuckerman plans on writing his third book, which will focus on remaking social media into a tool that is helpful to us as citizens and neighbors instead of the deeply problematic institution it is often understood to be these days.
Looking back on all of his tremendous accomplishments, Zuckerman is most proud of mentoring and seeing his former students become successful professors and activist leaders. He is proud of the volunteers within Global Voices who have gone on to be successful journalists and activists around the world. “Anything you do yourself is limited, but if I get to have a hand in someone becoming who they are meant to be, that’s pretty incredible.” We are so excited to have Zuckerman join us here at UMass and we are looking forward to seeing all that he will accomplish during his time here.