RPI scholar to speak Friday on Internet and democracy

Will the new technologies of the Internet lead to revitalization of democratic society, enabling citizens to become effectively self-governing? Or will this dream be derailed by mechanisms of inequality and centralized control?

Langdon Winner

That's the question that Langdon Winner, a scholar of politics and technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute?called the "leading academic on the politics of technology" by the Wall Street Journal?will address Friday night. He'll be the keynote speaker at the Four College Consortial Conference on Science, Politics and Society sponsored by the Honors Forum and First-Year Experience.

Winner will speak at approximately 7 p.m. on the second floor of Murray-Aikins Dining Hall. Any member of the Skidmore community may come at that time or join the group for dinner beginning at 6 p.m. (No RSVP is necessary, says David Vella, director of the Honors Forum.)

Holder of the Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences at RPI, Winner is the editor of Democracy in a Technological Society and the author of Autonomous Technology, a study of the idea of "technology-out-of-control" in modern social thought, and The Whale and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. As a scholar/activist, he has been involved in movements to create an environmentally sustainable future and to "resist the destructive schemes of global mega-technics."

All members of the Skidmore community also are invited to attend Saturday's presentations in Emerson Auditorium by Skidmore and Union students. Among the more intriguing titles: "Googling for Love: Using the Internet to Purchase a Bride," "Interactive Gaming," and "Lipstick on a Corpse: The Myth of Mountaintop Reclamation."

See the full conference schedule here.