Post-event

I am hoping to be able to make available a downloadable audio recording of this talk.

Background

This event was co-programmed with Professor Patrick Humphreys of the LSE Institute of Social Psychology, and Garrick Jones, and also addressed to the departments of Information Sciences and Media.

Invite

At the seminar, Hafner will use the history of the Internet, about which she has extensively researched and written, to make the argument for government funding of basic research, which, she observes, is currently dwindling in the US. She writes:

“In the U.S. there is a marked shift away from governmental funding of basic research. Spurred in part by increased security concerns, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon – which has long underwritten open-ended ‘blue sky’ research by the nation’s best computer scientists – is sharply cutting such spending at universities in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects at private military contractors that promise a more immediate payoff.

“In my talk, I will focus on the Internet, and its predecessor, the Arpanet, as principal examples of how DARPA funding has paid off handsomely in recent decades, and discuss the perils of such a public policy shift away from the funding of such important basic research.”

Hafner is a journalist and author focused on technology and society. She has been a reporter at The New York Times and contributing editor for Newsweek. She has worked at Business Week, and has written for Esquire, Wired, The New Republic and The New York Times magazine. She is co-author, with Matthew Lyon, of Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (Simon & Schuster Inc, 1998)