[Air-L] Steve Jones Lecture features Casey Fiedler in 2025 ICA

[Sarina Chen]

Dear Colleagues,


Greetings!



Casey Fiedler will give the Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture in the
2025 International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference on
Saturday, June 14, 3 pm to 4:30 pm, at Hyatt Regency Denver, in Denver, CO.


The title of Fiedler’s lecture is "The Internet is Good for You. The
Internet is Bad for You."  Fiedler notes that hardly a week passes without
a new ethical controversy centering on our lives online: privacy
violations, trolling and harassment, misinformation, negative impacts on
mental health. Fiedler indicates that discussions around these topics often
come with calls for drastic technical or policy solutions, like age gating
social media or even wholesale platform bans. However, Fiedler argues,
though instigating incidents make splashy headlines, the perceived
underlying problems are rarely so straightforward. Fiedler advises that
anonymity online allows harassment to flourish, but also provides access to
important support spaces, especially for stigmatized topics. Fiedler
suggests that social media recommendation algorithms can “know” us so well
that it feels simultaneously invasive and validating. Fiedler argues that
platforms can also help us find community—or push our content to the people
who would hate it most. Fiedler notes that social media is bad for us, and
social media is good for us; both of these things can be true at the same
time, and both tend to be amplified in the case of marginalized groups.
This talk takes a journey through the good and bad of people’s online
experiences, from queer fan fiction writers to Black Twitter to
professional content creators to health support communities, and poses the
ethical question: How can we get less of the bad without sacrificing the
good?


Casey Fiesler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information
Science (as well as Computer Science, by courtesy) at CU Boulder, with
additional affiliations with Silicon Flatirons at the law school and the
ATLAS Institute. She completed her PhD in Human-Centered Computing in the
school of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where her dissertation
focused on the role that copyright law plays in online creative
communities.  She primarily researches and teaches technology ethics and
law, and online communities. Current areas of focus include big data
research ethics, ethics education, ethical speculation in technology
design, content moderation and social media policy, technology empowerment
for marginalized communities, and broadening participation in computing;
much of this work is supported by the National Science Foundation
(including a CAREER grant), Mozilla, and Omidyar. Her research is
frequently covered in the media, including The New York Times, The
Washington Post, WIRED, and Teen Vogue. She and her students conduct
research under the umbrella of the Internet Rules Lab.



Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture Series, established by Carl Couch
Center for Social and Internet Research (CCCSIR, www.cccsir.com) in 2003,
brings leading Internet researchers to annual ICA conferences to promote
the development and interest of Internet research.  With the
interdisciplinary nature of Internet research, the lecture series brings
researchers from various disciplines as well as industry leaders to
establish dialogues with communication researchers about topics and issues
of Internet research.  The theme of Steve Jones Lecture Series is " The
Internet as Culture.”



For more information about this lecture and lecture series please contact
Shing-Ling Sarina Chen at sarina.chen at uni.edu.