You can’t always get what you want; or, why we need to get real about the net.

Naughton at ADAPTProfessor John Naughton will deliver a public lecture on

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

in the Trinity Long Room Hub (map here), on Wednesday, 29 April 2015, at 4:00pm.

The Internet as it is today is not the network we fondly imagined we would get. This lecture traces the evolution of the Net from its early days, outlines the forces that have shaped it and argues that we need to rethink both our attitudes to it and our public discourse about it. We need, in other words, to Get Real about the Net.

John NaughtonProfessor John Naughton (pictured left) is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. He is also: Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University; Vice-President of Wolfson College, Cambridge; and the Technology columnist of the Observer. His current research is on the implications for democracy of digital technology and his latest book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: what you really need to know about the Internet, is published by Quercus Books. He blogs at Memex 1.1 and tweets at @jjn1

The public lecture is organised in Trinity College Dublin to co-incide with Tech Week 2105 by the Privacy & Ethics Working Group of the ADAPT Centre Centre for Digital Content Technology, the School of Law, the School of Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies, and the Confederal School of Religions, Theology and Peace Studies. All are welcome to attend.