Rebecca MacKinnon (Media Activist)

Rebecca MacKinnon looks at issues of privacy, free expression and governance (or lack of) in the digital networks, platforms and networks on which we are all increasingly dependent.

As we push more and more of our social lives online, should we be (and how should we be) regulating these networks? Is there a human rights penalty we pay for trusting basic human connection to the Internet?

As a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Rebecca MacKinnon looks at these big questions in her upcoming book, Consent of the Networked, “a treatise on the future of liberty in the Internet age.”

A former head of CNN’s Beijing and Tokyo bureaus, MacKinnon is an expert on Chinese Internet censorship. She’s one of the founders (with Ethan Zuckerman) of the Global Voices Online blog network, which aggregates and translates news around the world that might otherwise go unheard.

In a frank, no-holds-barred 2006 interview, she talks about why she left CNN to become a blogger (great stuff!):

More recently, she spoke on CBS about recent events in the Middle East and if that kind of social unrest might be replicated in China; that interview is here.

She says: "The Egyptian Revolution makes it clear that digital technologies play a powerful role in global politics. But we should expect that role to be unpredictable."

Related Links:
rconversation.blogs.com
Global voices
Twitter: @rmack
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