A USC Annenberg Center for Communication convened by the Annenberg Schools for Communication, University of Southern California and the University of Pennsylvania

November 6 and 7, 1998 Davidson Conference Center, University of Southern California

Technological Visions: Utopian and Dystopian Perspectives will bring together journalists, academics, cyberculture advocates, policymakers, and science fiction visionaries to examine how technologies have been envisioned throughout history and the social impact of new technologies. The conference will explore ways of considering contemporary new technologies in light of how new technologies were represented and debated in the past. It intends to address the ahistorical nature of the public discourse of new technology and to encourage discussion across the boundaries of the social realms of academic, media, and industry on the impact of new technologies.

Sherry Turkle, Professor of Sociology of Science at MIT and author of Life on the Screen will give the keynote speech: Are the discourses surrounding the Internet a better guide to social action than those formulated in the early days of "old" technologies? Have we learned anything from the successes and failures of past attempts to predict what technology will do for us and to us?

Panels: The Problems and Potentials of Prediction Privacy and Censorship Communities of Place and Cyberspace Media Discourse on New Technology Technological Visions

Confirmed Participants: John Perry Barlow, Lord Asa Briggs, Richard Chabran, Bob Cringely, Wendy Grossman, Katie Hafner, Larry Irving, Peter Lyman, Carolyn Marvin, David Nye, Mitchel Resnick, Romelia Salinas, Vivian Sobchack, Lynn Spigel, Sherry Turkle, Langdon Winner, Philip Zimmermann

Conference Organizers: Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, Annenberg School for Communication

Conference Information: The conference is free and open to the public. It will be held at the Davidson Conference Center on the USC campus in downtown Los Angeles. The conference proceedings will be simulcast on the Metamorphosis web site.

For further information and updated schedules: http://www.metamorph.org For more information, contact: Douglas Thomas (213) 740-3937 douglast@usc.edu

Marita Sturken (213) 740-3950 sturken@usc.edu