Open access in the age of surveillance technology: Fighting for ground in the public imagination Dr. Erin Glass, University of California San Diego
Does the influence of surveillance technology in our academic and everyday information practices have any bearing on the open access movement? How might the open access movement fruitfully respond to these issues in ways that deepen its purpose while further serving the academic community and the broader public? In this talk, I show how the growing dominance of surveillance technology, or technology whose business models are based on monitoring and controlling of user behavior, threatens to exploit and undermine the goals and existing achievements of the open access movement. At the same time, however, I argue that an expanded vision of the open access mission could provide a powerful intellectual and political framework for resisting and transforming surveillant information systems in academia and more broadly. I suggest that some of the challenges in advancing more just and equitable information practices stem from the lack of representation of alternatives in popular culture, and consider how other movements use cultural and symbolic production to bring their values to the mainstream. Using examples from poetry, art, fiction, and television, I show how creative practices might help scholarly and public communities work together to imagine, motivate, and build more equitable and democratic global information systems.
Dr. Erin Glass is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at UC San Diego, where she facilitates the Digital Humanities Research Group. Her work focuses on using digital tools and social practices to make education and knowledge production more democratic, collaborative, and publicly engaged.
Sponsored by the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and the University of Victoria Libraries.