THE INTERNET IN EVERYTHING author Laura DeNardis in conversation with UNC Professor Alice Marwick
The Internet in Everything author Laura DeNardis in conversation with UNC Professor Alice Marwick
Monday 2/3, 7 pm
The Internet has leapt from human-facing display screens into the material objects all around us. In this so-called Internet of Things—connecting everything from cars to cardiac monitors to home appliances—there is no longer a meaningful distinction between physical and virtual worlds. Everything is connected. The social and economic benefits are tremendous, but there is a downside: an outage in cyberspace can result not only in a loss of communication but also potentially a loss of life. Control of this infrastructure has become a proxy for political power, since countries can easily reach across borders to disrupt real-world systems. Laura DeNardis argues that this diffusion of the Internet into the physical world radically escalates governance concerns around privacy, discrimination, human safety, democracy, and national security, and she offers new cyber-policy solutions. In her discussion, she makes visible the sinews of power already embedded in our technology and explores how hidden technical governance arrangements will become the constitution of our future.
Laura DeNardis is one of the word's leading Internet governance scholars and a professor and Interim Dean in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, DC. She is the author of The Global War for Internet Governance and other books.
Alice E. Marwick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Media Law and Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. Her current book project examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender, race, and socio-economic status.