Special Book Launch of "Captive Audience"; Internet Censorship and the Remembrance of Infowars Past

Captive Audience: The Future of Information in America

Tonight! Wednesday, December 12, 6:00pm ET, Wasserstein Hall Room 2012, Harvard Law School. Reception to follow.

Join us to celebrate the release of Susan Crawford's Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. Crawford uses the 2011 merger between Comcast and NBCU as a framework to explore how deregulatory changes in policy have created a communications crisis in America. From smartphones and television programming to the cost of high-speed Internet access, Captive Audience illustrates that in the Internet era, a very few companies control our information destiny. The consequences: Tens of millions of Americans are being left behind, people pay too much for too little Internet access, and speeds are slow. But everyday people can change this story - and what happens in the year ahead could change the game for good. Susan Crawford is the (Visiting) Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, a Professor at Cardozo Law School, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age (Yale 2012) and regularly contributes to Bloomberg View and Wired. She served as Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy during 2009 and co-led the FCC transition team between the Bush and Obama administrations. Crawford is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where she leads the Institute's work on making high-speed Internet access a universal, affordable resource for all, and a member of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Advisory Council on Technology and Innovation. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Internet Censorship and the Remembrance of Infowars Past

Tuesday, January 15, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, organizations and researchers have developed and distributed a variety of tools to assist Internet users to both monitor and circumvent such censorship. This talk will examine more closely some of the international law and politics of such censorship resistance activities through three case studies involving past global communications censorship and information conflicts— telegraph cable cutting and suppression, high frequency radio jamming, and direct broadcast satellite blocking— and the world community’s response to these conflicts. In addition to illustrating some of the legal, political, and security concerns that have animated historical instances of global communications censorship, the lecture will aim to extrapolate lessons and insights for Internet censorship (and its resistance) today, such as the legality of censorship (and its circumvention), the role of international institutions in disrupting (or facilitating) communications, and the effectiveness of Internet censorship monitoring and circumvention. Jon Penney is a lawyer, Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab / Canada Centre for Global Security Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, and a doctoral student in information communication sciences at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where his interdisciplinary research explores regulatory chilling effects online. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Kyle Parry on Trees and Physical-Virtual Borderlands: metaLAB and the Arnold Arboretum

Say the idea is to re-awaken our feelings for plants even at our hyper-networked speed — do we want digital tools to do the re-wiring or are we convinced their auto-brightness and push notifications divert us from the living, breathing nonhuman sensorium? Kyle Parry — a Researcher at metaLAB and a PhD student in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard — initiates a conversation along these lines by way of a discussion of Digital Ecologies, metaLAB's work-in-progress collaboration with Harvard's Arnold Arboretum video/audio on our website>