About the event
Speaker: Ramesh Srinivasan (UCLA)
The full talk will be available on our YouTube channel shortly.
Lately, we have seen public acknowledgment of concerns around the dominant technologies that have determined how we socialise, receive news, find information, and even know and think. Such systems, through exponential advances in data storage and computation as well as the release of mobile data, have now entered into nearly every aspect of contemporary life - our pockets, homes, even bodies.
Yet are those in charge of 'connecting' us actually in fact disconnected from the effects of the technologies they produce? What impacts does this have on aspects of our lives far removed from elite, Western engineering laboratories of Silicon Valley? And how can we balance profit and economic motives that are naturally part of business models for tech companies with our collective and diverse values, as users, communities, cultures, and societies? Building on fieldwork I have conducted across the world and introducing some of the ideas of a forthcoming trade book with MIT press, Ramesh Srinivasan, will discuss what is at stake as we attempt to craft a human-first digital future.
Ramesh Srinivasan is a faculty member at UCLA Information Studies and Design|Media Arts departments. He is the founder of the UC-wide Digital Cultures Lab, exploring the meaning of technology worldwide as it spreads to the far reaches of our world. He is also the author of the books: "Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Impacts Our World?" with NYU Press, and "After the Internet" (with Adam Fish) on Polity Press. Before joining UCLA Ramesh was a fellow in MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge and the MIT Media Lab Asia. He has also been a teaching fellow at the Graduate School or Design and Department of Visual and Environmental Design at Harvard.
A short networking reception will follow the talk.