The digital revolution is triggering a wave of new information control efforts, ranging from monopolistic patent laws to the Great Firewall of China. These efforts are sometimes conspicuous, as with the deletion of archives or the arrest of authors, and sometimes subtle, as in the fine-print terms of service contracts that accompany the software downloads that saturate our lives. How are these efforts affecting creativity, innovation, and discourse? How do they endanger the circulation and survival of art and knowledge in the digital age? And how can we craft policies that will simultaneously protect creators, businesses, consumers, artistic freedom, and privacy? This project proposes to answer these questions by leveraging our knowledge of the print revolution after 1450, a moment like our own, when the explosive dissemination of a new information technology triggered a wave of information control efforts. Many of today’s attempts at information control closely parallel early responses to the printing press, so the pre-modern case gives us centuries of data showing how such attempts variously incentivized, discouraged, curated, silenced, commodified, or nurtured art and expression. Examining the digital revolution in light of the print revolution will help us avoid repeating past mistakes, and let us craft information control policies that will make the digital world a fertile space for art and innovation.
A public dialogue series will bring together scholars of print revolutions past and present with practitioners working on the frontiers of today’s information revolution. These events will not be formal panels with presented papers, but freeform discussions in which experts bounce ideas off each other, discovering rich parallels between our work and sharing them in real time. Taking place from October through November, the eight dialogues will unite historians, editors, novelists, poets, and activists, and will be filmed and shared online, to let the public enjoy and continue the discussions.
Associate Professor, Early Modern European History and the College
University of Chicago
Ada Palmer’s research on intellectual history, or the history of ideas, explores how history and thought shape each other over time. The Italian Renaissance is a perfect moment for approaching this question because at that point the ideas about science, religion, and the world that had developed...
Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College
University of Chicago
Adrian Johns is the author of The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (Chicago, 2023), Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (Norton, 2010), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates...
Science Fiction Author, Activist, Journalist, and Blogger; Co-Editor of Boing Boing
Cory Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his...
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This public dialogue series, supported by the
New news media have been a hot topic in political analysis the past few years. In this talk, an interdisciplinary group of scholars compared current news media’s growing pains to how news...
One of the thorniest faces of free speech debate is the tension between free expression as an abstract principle and kinds of speech that harm, such as hate speech, incitements to violence, or...
Censorship’s attempts to destroy a book, strengthen a regime, or silence a movement often fail in those direct objectives but have other profound effects on literature, culture, language, even...
This discussion served as the introduction to a public dialogue series supported by the
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This public dialogue series, supported by the
New news media have been a hot topic in political analysis the past few years. In this talk, an interdisciplinary group of scholars compared current news media’s growing pains to how news...
One of the thorniest faces of free speech debate is the tension between free expression as an abstract principle and kinds of speech that harm, such as hate speech, incitements to violence, or...
Censorship’s attempts to destroy a book, strengthen a regime, or silence a movement often fail in those direct objectives but have other profound effects on literature, culture, language, even...
This discussion served as the introduction to a public dialogue series supported by the
