MacKinnon to speak on 'Shaping the Internet's Global Future'

1:27 p.m., April 19, 2013--Journalist, author and media expert Rebecca MacKinnon will speak on “Shaping the Internet’s Global Future” in a University of Delaware Global Agenda speaker series at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 24, in Mitchell Hall.

The presentation will be moderated by Ralph Begleiter, director of UD’s Center for Political Communication.

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The Global Agenda series is considering “America’s Role in the World,” and speakers include journalists, national security experts and international government officials. The presentations are free and open to the public.

MacKinnon is the author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom and a book signing will follow the presentation.

She also is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, working on global Internet policy, free expression, and the impact of digital technologies on human rights. 

MacKinnon is cofounder of Global Voices, an international citizen media network, and a former broadcast news correspondent in China. 

She also serves on the boards of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Global Network Initiative.

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon worked as a journalist for CNN in Beijing for nine years and was Beijing bureau chief and correspondent from 1998-2001, then served as CNN’s Tokyo bureau chief and correspondent from 2001-03.

From 2004-06 she was a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where she began her ongoing research and writing about the Chinese Internet in addition to launching Global Voices with colleague Ethan Zuckerman. 

In 2007-08 she taught online journalism at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. In 2009 she conducted research and writing as an Open Society Fellow, and in the spring of 2010 she was a visiting fellow at Princeton’s Center or Information Technology Policy.