The End of Digital Democracy and What We Can Do About It

Friday, October 21, 2022 11:30am-1pm in DMC 5.208 – Dean’s Office Briefing Room

Digital technologies were supposed to help strengthen democracy around the world, not threaten them. In this talk Professor Gina Neff of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge will look back on the optimism about digital democracy, address the key challenges and threats to digital democracy, and suggest ways to help rebalance power toward technologies that work better for the social good.

Gina Neff is the Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Technology & Society at the University of Oxford.

Her books include Venture Labor (MIT Press 2012), Self-Tracking (MIT Press 2016) and Human-Centered Data Science (MIT Press 2022). Her research focuses on the effects of the rapid expansion of our digital information environment on workers and workplaces and in our everyday lives. Professor Neff holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University and advises international organisations including UNESCO, the OECD, Social Science Research Council (US), Economic and Social Research Council (UK), and the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society. She chairs the International Scientific Committee of the UK’s Trusted Autonomous Systems programme and is a member of the Strategic Advisory Network for the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. Her academic research has won both engineering and social sciences awards. She also led the team that won the 2021 Webby for the best educational website on the Internet, for the A to Z of AI, which has reached over a million people in 17 different languages.