Join the Cyber Policy Center on December 3rd from 1PM–2PM Pacific for Defending the Freedoms of the Internet (Because Someone Has To), a seminar with Jeff Jarvis, moderated by Nate Persily. Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 12:40 PM for lunch, prior to the seminar.

About the Seminar

In his book, The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panics, journalist Jeff Jarvis asserts that the internet should be viewed as a human more than a technological enterprise — and as such, its failures are often ours to address. He examines various sins attributed to the internet, calling on research to question commonly held assumptions and accusations about hate, disinformation, addiction, and so-called surveillance capitalism. The book is a critique of media’s coverage of the internet and artificial intelligence. Jarvis, a journalist, places media’s current moral panic into context of moral panics past, over novels and nickelodeons, TV and videogames. He accuses his colleagues in news of not addressing their own conflicts of interest in covering what they see as the competitor threatening their existence. And he tries to remind readers of the privilege and fortune of living in this connected age, offering a thank-you note to the net. He examines various regulatory regimes for the internet and in the end, urges every affected constituency — technologist, corporation, government, media, and each of us — to enter into covenants of mutual obligation so we all may be held accountable for the internet and the future we build on it. 
 

About the Speaker

Jeff Jarvis, a journalist and journalism educator, is the author of six books, including The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and its Lessons for the Age of the Internet and Magazine, each published currently by Bloomsbury Academic. He is now writing a cultural history of the Linotype as a technology that opened the door to the long century of mass media. 

Jarvis is now a visiting professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism and a distinguished fellow at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. At both, he is helping to develop new programs focused on technology and society. He is the emeritus Leonard Tow professor of journalism innovation at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. There, he developed three new degree programs in engagement journalism, entrepreneurial journalism, and news innovation and leadership.

In his career in media, Jarvis was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Condé Nast and Advance Local; creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc.; Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; TV critic of TV Guide and People magazines; and a columnist and editor on the San Francisco Examiner and Chicago Tribune. He was also a media columnist on the Guardian.

Jarvis is cohost of the podcasts The Week in Google and AI Inside.