It has become a truism that the Internet fosters narrow echo chambers that threaten democratic principles. To combat this fragmentation, many have advocated for more inclusive approaches to moderation and evaluation. According to Professor Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, this important work is still not enough. Chun will describe how the segregated networks of today’s internet are in fact entwined with our nation’s long history of residential segregation. Desegregating our online communities also requires us to address more concrete forms of separation and exclusion.

Cosponsored by the Annenberg School for Communication and the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun will be the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University and is a Visiting Scholar at Penn's Center for Media at Risk for the Fall 2018 semester. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006),  Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), and Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016)..  She is co-editor (with Tara McPherson and Patrick Jagoda) of a special issue of American Literature entitled New Media and American Literature, co-editor (with Lynne Joyrich) of a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology and co-editor (with Anna Fisher and Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd edition (forthcoming Routledge, 2015).  She was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, ACLS and American Academy of Berlin Fellow, and she has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. She has been the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is currently an Associate.