| 12 Oct 2010 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm | Room 3, Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, 8 Mill Lane, Cambridge | |
- Description
Description
Humanitas Visiting Professor in Media 2010
The Humanitas Chair in Media has been made possible by the generous support of the Blavatnik Family Foundation
Dr Mathias Döpfner (Chairman, CEO Axel Springer AG)
Freedom and the Digital Revolution
Lecture 2: The Internet – a liberating or enslaving machine?
The invention of the internet marks a revolution of our civilisation at whose outset we still stand. Will this revolution be a breakthrough for freedom or will it become a coup for slavery? Generally, the Internet nurtures an anti-authoritarian information culture and promotes the free dissemination of information. At the same time, we are seeing in the Internet a centuries-old, classic struggle over the sovereignty of content, a battle against censorship dressed in technologically new garb, as encountered in China. Also, freedom is under attack internally from the anti-authoritarian fundamental reverberations of the Internet itself and from new technologies such as geo-tagging and face recognition, which may lead to a truly Orwellian scenario.
Further lectures in the series are:
A symposium entitled, The Digital Revolution and its Futures, will take place on Tuesday 2 November.
The lectures are free and open to all. (Please note the different locations of each lecture.)
Registration is required for the symposium
About the Professorships
Humanitas is a series of Visiting Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge intended to bring leading practitioners and scholars to both universities to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Created by Lord Weidenfeld, the Programme is managed and funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue with the support of a series of generous benefactors and administered in Cambridge by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Humanitas Visiting Professors are held by distinguished academics and leading practitioners who have contributed to interdisciplinary research and innovation in a broad range of contemporary disciplines in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Covering areas of urgent or enduring interest in today's society as well as the performing arts, Humanitas Visiting Professors will present their pioneering work through a series of lectures or performances open to University audiences and the wider public.
