Recent Posts

What if our nation is not built for climate change?

What if our nation is not built for climate change?

Florida is preparing for Hurricane Milton, the second significant storm in two weeks to impact the s…

Road trip: The Company Town and the Corn Fields

Road trip: The Company Town and the Corn Fields

“The rest rooms are upstairs. Turn left at the Chihuly.” While those aren’t the di…

Roadtrip: A tale of two cities

Roadtrip: A tale of two cities

Cities change over time. Communities that were organized around production of steel or auto parts or…

Roadtrip: Utica Starts With You

Roadtrip: Utica Starts With You

I tried to write this post from the last leg of my trip, between Utica, NY and Pittsfield, MA. I&#82…

Road trip: Peoria to Kankakee

Road trip: Peoria to Kankakee

In 1999, a book called The Places Rated Almanac offered a ranking of American cities in terms of the…

Neon sign that reads "soy city motel"

Roadtrip: Decatur, from corn to soy to cricket city?

Heading into Decatur on Illinois Route 48, you quickly begin to sense a pattern. You pass a field of…

Ethan Zuckerman

Hi. I’m Ethan Zuckerman. I’m a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where I teach Public Policy, Communication and Information. I’m starting a new research center called the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure. Over the years, I’ve been a tech startup guy (with Tripod.com), a non-profit founder (Geekcorps.org) and co-founder (Globalvoices.org), and throughout it all, a blogger.

I started blogging here in 2003 when this site was titled “My Heart’s in Accra”. I now write in a lot of different fora – for The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review and other sites, on my Medium page and as part of different university projects. Blogging led me to writing books as well as academic and journalistic articles, and much of that work features here.

Books

Mistrust

How can you change society if you lose faith in institutions like governments and corporations? Mistrust (2021) is a guidebook to social change through movements that try to change minds and hearts as well as laws.

Rewire

 Is the Internet bringing us closer together? Or just insulating us in our echo chambers? Rewire (2013) explores ways to break those echo chambers and build a more connected world.

Projects

iDPI

 Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure – a new research center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, exploring future visions of the internet that center civic life and the public good.

Gobo

A social media aggregator that gives you control over what and who you hear the most from. 

Media Cloud

A free, open source tool for tracking ideas, individuals and stories across the open web.

Global Voices

An online community of writers, artists and translators who work together to bring a richer, more nuanced picture of life around the world, with contributors in over 150 countries.

Articles

“The Internet’s Original Sin” is an article I wrote for the Atlantic about the toxic nature of the ad supported internet… and my confession of unleashing the popup ad on the world.

“The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure” offers a vision of how we might build an internet on values of civic engagement rather than private profit.

“Cute Cats to the Rescue?” is an oldie but goodie – my attempt to explain the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism and censorship resistance in academic form.

Tweets & Podcasts

Podcast: Reimagining the Internet

My Tweets
Twitter feed is not available at the moment.

Public Speaking

My Talks

I enjoy public speaking as a way to develop new ideas, meet new people and see different parts of the world. My TED talk, seen below, is a good introduction both to my public speaking and the ideas in my books.

I don’t use an agent for speaking – if you want to invite me to speak at your event, conference or bar mitzvah, contact me through my contact form.

Fixing Social Media
What the Post Office Can Tell us about the Internet