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Dear all,

(With apologies for cross-posting.) Please join us on February 19th at 1–2:30pm in 440 Curry Student Center for a talk by Dariusz Jemielniak of Kozminski University: “Collaborative Society: How Technology Amplifies on Natural Cooperative Tendencies.” We often hear how technology is isolating and polarizing society, but Professor Jemielniak illuminates the positive sides of technology, discussing how it can facilitate cooperation and multiply tendencies to engage in prosocial behavior.

The event details are below—please see the event page and attached flyer for full details:
https://web.northeastern.edu/nulab/event/dariusz-jemielniak/.

Abstract:
Collaboration may be an evolutionary mechanism that emerged as a result of the way our early ancestors acquired cooperative practices regarding food. Sharing resources seems natural to us; indeed, much human sharing follows strong social norms of equity and fairness. As Matthew D. Lieberman shows, even our brains react in deeply social and cooperation-oriented ways. We are, in fact, wired to be super-cooperators. Homo sapiens may have evolved via selection for prosociality in a process Brian Hare calls the “survival of the friendliest.” This quite powerful drive to cooperate with others starts early in life; studies show that the preference for prosocial behavior in humans begins as early as infancy.

Human collaboration enabled by technology can occur in specific contexts such as peer production and collaborative consumption, or more generally through online sharing and exchange platforms. Emerging technologies, thanks to their direct collaboration-enabling features and their engagement of much broader populations, act as super-multipliers for many effects of collaboration that would otherwise be less noticeable. This phenomenon emanates from what I call collaborative society: an emerging trend that changes the social, cultural, and economic fabric of human organization through technology-fostered cooperative behaviors and interactions.

Biography:
Dariusz Jemielniak is Full Professor of Management at Kozminski University (Poland) where he heads the MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies) department. He is also associate faculty at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society (Harvard) and a Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees member. He has recently been elected as corresponding member to the Polish Academy of Sciences, as the youngest person in social sciences and humanities in history.

He is the author of “Common Knowledge?” (2014, Stanford University Press), winner of the Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture in 2015, and the Chair of the Polish Academy of Sciences academia award in 2016. He has two upcoming books: “Collaborative Society” (2020, MIT Press, co-authored by A. Przegalinska) and “Thick Big Data” (2020, Oxford University Press).

He has held annual appointments at Cornell University (2004-2005), Harvard University (2007, 2011-2012, 2015-2016, 2019-2020), University of California Berkeley (2008), and MIT (2015-2016, 2019-2020). His research focuses on open collaboration, peer production, and sharing economy.

This event is free and open to the public, but if you are not a member of the Northeastern community, please email Sarah Connell, [log in to unmask], to register.

Lastly, please take a moment and share this information with anyone who may be interested.

Kind regards,