Presented by BAMO – Burlington Access Management Organizations
A Partnership of VCAM, RETN & CCTV Center for Media & Democracy
Digital Media at the Crossroads: Communications, Content and Control in the Internet era – A talk wtih Jeff Chester
When: Thursday, September 22nd 2011 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. – Public Event
Where: Alumni Auditorium at Champlain College in Burlington
Suggested Donation: $5
Largely still invisible, dramatic changes are occurring that will transform how all Americans (and many around the world) receive their news, information and entertainment. While the political debate has focused on the implications to personal privacy from digital data collection, the same online business models are having a major impact in how content gets funded and is distributed.
Increasingly, our digital “profiles”–signaling our economic worth, race, geography and other data will determine what information we receive. We all will be given invisible digital “Scarlet Letters” that will signal to powerful media companies and advertisers not only who we are, but our location as well. All in real-time. For many Americans not seen as worthy, they will face new forms of discrimination.
US based companies and technologies are transforming the global digital media marketplace, including through the development of far-reaching approaches designed to integrate advanced data collection techniques with applications that influence unconscious behavior. All the leading digital marketing companies and many global advertisers, for example, are using forms of neuromarketing designed to bypass conscious decision-making, including Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. Increasingly, how we are sold financial products, prescription drugs and even politicians will be determined by the interactive marketing apparatus. US companies are also in the forefront of exporting technologies and a business model–known as real-time bidding–where users are bought and sold in milliseconds. Such practices are now found in both the EU and in Asia, including in regimes with human rights violations. What responsibility do we as Americans have for the exporting of technologies of surveillance?
This special presentation with Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy will explore the latest developments in technologically advanced personalized data targeting, the role of the leading online marketing companies, new approaches to policy and safeguard development, its impact on diverse and progressive media content, and implications to the future of democracy and human rights.
