Equality Lab Events

Location

This lecture will be rescheduled for the Spring semester. We apologize for the confusion.

Join us for Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan's lecture, "The Operating System of Our Lives: How Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are Battling Each Other for Control of Our Bodies." This talk with describe a phenomenon that explains many of the plans, products, and strategies that the largest technology firms in the world have deployed in recent years. Instead of struggling to be the operating system of our mobile devices or merely our computers, these companies are moving their attention to human beings themselves. This process will reveal crucial questions about autonomy and democracy in the coming years.

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 Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy  (Oxford University Press, 2018). He also wrote Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), and The Googlization of Everything -- and Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011). He has written two previous books: Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). He also co-edited (with Carolyn Thomas) the collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Contact

Khanh Vo, Equality Lab Graduate Assistant at [[e|kvvo]], Elizabeth Losh, Associate Professor of English at [[emlosh]]