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.
The executive branch wants to take control of the scientific enterprise. To stay independent, scientists will need better ways to demonstrate their work’s connection to society’s needs.
