Matthew Hindman

This piece originally appeared on the Op-Ed page of the Boston Globe on March 27, 2004.

A Worthy Strategy for Affordable Housing

By MATTHEW HINDMAN

WHEN JOHN WINTHROP led the Puritans across the Atlantic, he dreamed of filling the new Massachusetts Bay Colony with numerous small, autonomous, self-governing villages.

Much to his chagrin, he succeeded -- and independent-minded town deputies proved a recurring headache during his many terms as the colony's governor.

 This piece originally appeared in the International Herald Tribune, December 11, 2003.

Keep the Web Worldly and Wide

By MATTHEW HINDMAN and KENNETH NEIL CUKIER

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- The World Wide Web as we know it was born 10 years ago last month when a handful of students at the University of Illinois released a tiny piece of software called the Mosaic browser. Later renamed Netscape, it made the Internet a colorful and inviting medium that anyone could navigate.

Millions soon flocked online, and Netscape's public stock listing two years later ushered in the dot-com boom.

Today 600 million people around the world use the Web, digital traffic doubles each year and the most common language online will soon be Chinese.

This piece originally appeared in The New York Times, June 2, 2003.

More Media, Less Diversity

By MATTHEW HINDMAN and KENNETH NEIL CUKIER

AMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to decide today whether decades-old regulations on news media ownership should be loosened. It is expected to do so -- in part on the rationale that the Internet increases the number of information sources that Americans see. This reasoning is mistaken.

This piece originally appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times, December 25, 2002.

How the Web Will Change Campaigns

By MATTHEW HINDMAN 

CAMBRIDGE, MASS--The Internet was supposed to change the nature of politics. Technology would bring participatory democracy to a new level, ushering in a sort of Jefferson-meets-the-Jetsons era. But as the new Congress prepares to convene next month, a look at the Web's role in the recent midterm elections reveals that so far, such claims are as inflated as the predictions that the Internet would bankrupt bricks-and-mortar businesses.

The Web has transformed the "C2V" (candidate-to-voter) relationship even less than it has changed the "B2C" (business-to-consumer) dynamic. Still, just as in the dot-com world, it has had a real impact on logistics and operations.