I took the fall semester off from teaching, which is a good thing, as I’ve been traveling far more than is healthy, mostly to give talks. I was in Sao Paulo last week talking about Brazil role as a center for democratic innovation, and hope to post either notes or a video of that talk soon. But here are two others that are already online and that I’m proud of:
“Journalism after Snowden: Normalizing Surveillance”
The estimable Emily Bell of Columbia’s Tow Center is editing a volume of essays about how the documents revealed by Edward Snowden have changed journalism as we know it. Most of the participants in the project are, like Emily, long-time newsroom veterans with smart things to say about journalism’s future. Since the last newsroom I worked in was that of the Lewisboro Ledger in 1989, I thought it would be wise if I played towards my strengths and talked about advertising, surveillance and the idea that a public sphere that monitors our every movement is corrosive to the notion of citizenship.
I leaned heavily on a paper by Kevin Haggerty and Richard Erickson, “The Surveillant Assemblage”, which in turn leans on Gilles Deleuze and FeÌlix Guattari to offer a view of surveillance that’s pervasive to the point of inescapability – thanks to Kate Crawford for pointing me to this paper. The question I ended up asking in the talk was whether organizations like newspapers (and, pointedly, The Guardian, where Emily is a board member) had a responsibility to try to create surveillance-free civic spaces. Fun questions – I don’t have the answers, but I was happy to have the chance to explore these ideas.
“Digital Cosmopolitans”, my Google Books talk
This other talk covers material that’s familiar to folks that regularly read this blog. It was my contribution to the Talks at Google series, speaking about “Digital Cosmopolitans”, née “Rewire”, now out in paperback. I have had the hilarious misfortune to be touring the book at the same time that Amanda Palmer is touring her excellent The Art of Asking – I gave a reading at Porter Square books the evening after her book launched and spoke to an extremely small, though enthusiastic crowd. Now I discover I’m following her at Google as well. No worries – she’s awesome, and next time I will ask her if I can simply refer to her as my opening act.
Anyway, Google are great hosts, and this is one of the better version of the Rewire/Digital Cosmopolitans book talk, so if you haven’t heard me try to summarize the book in half an hour, here’s your chance.
I’ve been doing some cool radio interviews lately as well. Benjamen Walker’s awesome “Theory of Everything” Podcast is doing a series called “The Dislike Club”, which basically features people who think about the internet realizing that we’re really pissed off about the current state of things online. In the second episode, I get to talk about my confession and penance regarding my role in bringing the pop-up ad to life – it’s a good conversation.
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Keep your eyes open for Gimlet Media’s new Reply All podcast – it’s a relaunched version of the excellent TL:DR, which spun out of On the Media. I’m likely on an upcoming episode, offering my same lame apologies for making the internet a worse place.
Even declaring this as a selfie, I’m not super comfortable with a post that just lists talks I’ve given lately. So two other talks to point to:
Willow Brugh has been working on question of “weaponized social”, the ways that online spaces for deliberation and debate are too often turning into spaces of personal threat. She’s working on face to face meetups to explore the idea and its consequences, and is bringing it into unexpected contexts, like a gathering of female programmers and computer enthusiasts in Kenya, hosted by the remarkable Akirachix. Check out her presentation, and a broader conversation about tech and gender in Kenya, above.
Micah Sifry has a terrific new book out, which I hope to be reviewing next week. In the meantime, my students blogged his talk today at Berkman (which I missed because I’m in Budapest.) Micah is deeply passionate about the ways the internet could be used for social and political change, and honest about the ways in which internet enthusiasts have thus far fallen short. His book, The Big Disconnect, is well worth your time. More about it next week.