This week, I am delivering the Ian Kerr Memorial Lecture at the University of Ottawa. Ian was a tremendous force in technology policy around the world and an unbelievably generous mentor and friend. He was also a lover of comics so I cartooned my remarks, which cover a conversation I wish I could have had with him.
Concerns about children and technology are everywhere, and "moral panic" gets thrown around a lot, usually to end conversations rather than start them. In this comic, I unpack the idea of moral panic and how it can help us make sense of today’s debates over children’s online safety.
Meg Leta Jones is a tech policy professor and cartoonist in the Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) program at Georgetown University where she researches rules and technological change. She’s also a founding faculty member of the Center for Digital Ethics and a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown Law Center. Ctrl+Z: The Right to be Forgotten, Meg’s first book, is about the social, legal, and technical issues surrounding digital oblivion. Her second book project, The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and Future of Technology Policy, tells the transatlantic history of digital consent through the lens of a familiar technical object. Her current research and cartoons revolve around family technology policy and involve a number of collaborative projects with incredible Georgetown colleagues and students.
