Joseph Reagle, Jr.

2003 Doctoral Fellow in Media Ecology

It is not often that one encounters a self-confessed computer geek who describes himself as a "practitioner." But that is the way Joseph Reagle, Jr., recipient of a Media Ecology Doctoral Fellowship, characterizes himself. When he talks about his interest in the interrelationship between technical and social issues and the creation and interactions of Internet communities he makes his profession sound like a calling: "I like making an appreciable contribution, I like learning, and I like writing about my experience--a cycle of action and reflection."

Reagle has a Computer Science bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland and a Masters from MIT's Technology and Policy Program. He was a policy analyst and research engineer at the World Wide Web Consortium/MIT where he helped lead the development and authoring of a number of technical standards. During a sabbatical, he was Resident Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School where he wrote and lectured about his experiences at the WC3 on social protocols, web-data schema design and contract law, computer agents and legal agency, and Internet culture and democratic/ anarchist principles.

As a doctoral student, Reagle is interested in exploring the collaborative communities that make use of on-line chat rooms, blogs (a shortened form of "web log," loosely used to describe a range of content including links, news, comments, journal entries, essays and photographs), e-mail lists, and Wiki (a form of participatory encyclopedia). "I want to focus on the production and publication of content on the Web by collaborative communities," he explains. "I would like to start by examining the Web as a form of media with its own economies, culture, and policy issues."

To this end, Reagle is excited by the variety of interdisciplinary opportunities at NYU; in addition to the exciting core of focus at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, he hopes to take courses in the Graduate School of Arts and Science and the Stern School of Business. "Spanning the boundaries of disciplines is an extraordinarily rich and exciting position to occupy," he says. "Just as open source software permits one to re-use functionality from other applications, one discipline may have already solved a problem that another is still wrestling with."