About this Event
This is a hybrid event. The lecture will take place at the Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut Street, Room 500. If you wish to attend the event virtually, please proceed to registration to receive a Zoom webinar link.
In this talk, Dr. Christopher Ali, Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications and Professor of Telecommunications at the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University, ruminates on the question of meaningful connectivity, offering qualitative evidence from previous and current research projects that investigate how policy decisions are lived, articulated, and experienced throughout the country. Drawing from critical political economy, critical geography, and lived theology, Ali argues that meaningful connectivity is part of a spectrum of power. The withholding of connectivity, be it in infrastructure or price, represents one side of the spectrum, where un- and under-connected households are told to wait their turns. Tipping the balance towards the user, the citizen, and the consumer, and thus moving from a state of digital scarcity to digital abundance, means stripping away broadband’s market-based logics and imbibing connectivity with the discursive markers of public utilities, interests, services, and maybe even rights.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, United States
USD 0.00