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Contact: Bruce Conley
Associate Director of College Relations
Phone: (605) 274-5526
Fax: (605) 274-4903
www.augie.edu
April 16, 2007
SIOUX FALLS – Andrew McLaughlin, head of global public policy and government affairs for Google, Inc., is the keynote speaker for the 2007 Augustana Symposium April 21.
The symposium showcases student presentations from 1:00-5:00 p.m. in the Madsen Center. More than 30 students will present papers and posters of their original research. McLaughlin’s address begins at 7:00 p.m. in the Chapel of Reconciliation.
The second annual Augustana Library Associates Research Award of $250 will be presented prior to the keynote address.
McLaughlin also serves as a Senior Fellow at The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. The title of his presentation is “A New New World: The Democratization of Knowledge, Culture, Politics, and Pretty Much Everything in Between.”
His talk will explore what’s happening on the Internet, and what it could mean for politics, business, culture, and the pursuit of peace, love, and understanding.
According to McLaughlin, the Internet is finally starting to live up to its potential, and the implications are both dazzling and scary. From blogs to social networks to video and photo sharing sites to massively multiplayer online universes, the Internet is now nurturing a vast, proliferating array of sites and services that enable creativity and expression on an unprecedented scale. We are in the early stages of a radical worldwide democratization of both the production and distribution of information, knowledge, and culture.
Thanks to cheap computers, high-speed broadband, ubiquitous mobile connectivity, and powerful online tools, any teenager with a laptop can now generate high-quality multimedia journalism, parody, criticism, fiction, poetry, music, movies, political commentary and polemic, visual and graphic art, and publish it to the world. Generally speaking, this is a very good thing: the age of the passive consumer of mass-produced, spoon-fed information coming to a close, and the planet should throw a gigantic party to celebrate its demise.
At the same time, this phenomenon presents a profound set of challenges to institutions, interests, policies, business models, and social relationships that have been built for a world of passive citizens and the controlled distribution of knowledge and culture. A borderless medium, the Internet enables global collaboration, communication, and publication, but also identify theft, copyright infringement, defamation, and extremist propaganda.
A reception in the Siverson Lounge follows McLaughlin’s address.