Monday, Sept. 24
Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy”
Whitley Auditorium, 7:30 p.m.
If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook.
Facebook grew out of an ideological commitment to data-driven decision-making and the power of connectivity, championing the spread of knowledge to empower people to change their lives for the better. No company better represents the dream of a fully connected planet “sharing” words, ideas, images and plans. No company has better leveraged those ideas into wealth and influence. Yet no company has contributed more to the global collapse of basic tenets of deliberation and democracy. How did the mission go so wrong? Author, professor and former journalist Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses this all in his latest book, “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of “Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction” from Oxford University Press (2017) and “The Googlization of Everything – and Why We Should Worry” (2011). He has written two previous books and edited another. He has appeared in an episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to discuss early social network services. He serves on the board of the Digital Public Library of America. He has written for many periodicals, including The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post and The Guardian, and has appeared on news programs on BBC, CNN, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, ABC and public media. A former journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a faculty associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Sponsored by the School of Communications, the Council on Civic Engagement, and the Turnage Family Fund for the Study of Political Communication