Hey Id,
I got invited to a conference that might be more up your alley, given this thread. want me to recommend you instead?
The UCLA Center for Communication Policy and The Freedom Forum (with support
from the New America Foundation) are organizing an event on Thursday,
November 30, 2000 to look at the first year?s release of the Center?s
ground-breaking project on the state of the Internet - ?Surveying the
Digital Future? - and to explore the deeper social, political and economic
implications of the findings. The full-day event will be held several weeks
after the initial public release on October 25 to allow conference
participants the opportunity to digest the results of the project. The
event will be held at the Freedom Forum Rooftop Conference Center
(overlooking Washington, D.C.) in Arlington, Virginia.
This is the study that should have been conducted on television in the 1940s
and will allow policy and business leaders as well as journalists, academics
and parents to observe first-hand the effects of this revolutionary
technology on users and non-users alike. Funded by the National Science
Foundation, America Online, Microsoft, Disney, Sony, Verizon, Pacific Bell,
Merrill Lynch, DirecTV, the Getty Trust and the National Cable Television
Association, the Center?s Internet Project is
based at UCLA and being conducted in Singapore, Italy, Sweden, Finland,
Germany, France, Hungary, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and a
growing list of additional countries.
Each year, beginning this October, the Center will release an annual picture
of the ways in which technology is changing our lives by looking at
non-users as they become users, early users as they become experienced users
and the difficult question of who remains a non-user.
The conference will bring together business and policy leaders, our
international partners, corporate supporters and others from around the
world to look at current developments on the Internet. The day will be
broken into the following topic areas:
1) Who is on the Internet, who is not and what are they doing
2) Impact of the Internet on freedom of expression, on other media and
issues of trust
3) Consumer behavior
4) Communication patterns
5) Social and psychological effects.
During the November 30 conference, each subject area will be the focus of a
panel of governmental and policy leaders, business executives (drawn from
the companies supporting the project and others), journalists, investment
analysts and academics. It is our strong desire to create lively panels of
those who love and hate technology and those whose lives are changing. The
Center?s research will set the stage for the conference, but the panels and
discussion will go far beyond that research to look at both practical and
far-range issues. Between the panels will be short addresses by leading
members of the Internet community, including George Vradenburg, senior vice
president of global strategy and policy at AOL (and one of the project
sponsors).
fatb |
