Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies
On April 13th Professor Gaia Bernstein discussed her new book, Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies.
Our society has a technology problem. Many want to disconnect from screens but can’t help themselves. These days we spend more time online than ever. Some turn to self-help-measures to limit their usage, yet repeatedly fail, while parents feel particularly powerless to help their children. Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies shows us a way out. Rather than blaming users, the book shatters the illusion that we autonomously choose how to spend our time online. It shifts the moral responsibility and accountability for solutions to corporations. Drawing lessons from the tobacco and food industries, the book demonstrates why government regulation is necessary to curb technology addiction. It describes a grassroots movement already in action across courts and legislative halls. Groundbreaking and urgent, Unwired provides a blueprint to develop this movement for change, to one that will allow us to finally gain control. The book is available for order here: shorturl.at/nyMR2
This event is co-sponsored by The Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School.
Gaia Bernstein is the Technology, Privacy and Policy Professor, Co-Director of the Institute for Privacy Protection and Co-Director of the Gibbons Institute for Law Science and Technology at the Seton Hall University School of Law. Professor Bernstein specializes in law and technology, information privacy, health privacy, intellectual property, law and genetics, and reproductive technologies. Her scholarship examines users’ interactions with new technologies across diverse legal fields. Professor Bernstein’s book: Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies was published in March 2023 with Cambridge University Press. She is the founding director of the Institute for Privacy Protection. She created and spearheaded the Institute’s nationally recognized Outreach Program, which educated parents and students about technology overuse and privacy.
Professor Bernstein’s scholarship has been published in leading law reviews including the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Boston College Law Review, the Boston University Law Review, the Washington Law Review and the U.C. Davis Law Review. Her work has been selected to the Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum and received extensive media coverage. Professor Bernstein was the Chair of the Section on Privacy and Defamation and a member of the Executive Board of the Section on Intellectual Property of the American Association of Law Schools.