LIVE from NYPL: Tim Wu | Douglas Rushkoff

Do you pay attention to what you’re paying attention to? LIVE invites you to focus in on author and policy advisor Tim Wu, who reminds readers in his new book The Attention Merchants that careful attention is both scarce and incredibly valuable. Wu will be joined in conversation by writer, documentarian, and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, Douglas Rushkoff.

TIM WU is an author, policy advocate, professor at Columbia Law School, and director of the Poliak Center for the Study of First Amendment Issues at Columbia Journalism School. Wu's best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, but he also writes about private power, free speech, copyright, and antitrust.  In 2014, he ran as the progressive Democrat candidate for lieutenant governor of New York. His book The Master Switch (2010) has won wide recognition and various awards. Wu is a contributing writer at NewYorker.com and a former contributing editor at The New Republic. He formerly wrote for Slate, where he won the Lowell Thomas Gold medal for Travel Journalism. Wu worked at the Federal Trade Commission during the first term of the Obama administration, and has also worked as Chair of the media reform group Free Press, as a fellow at Google, and worked for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry.  In 2015, he was appointed to the Executive Staff of the Office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as a senior enforcement counsel and special advisor.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT,  promotes human autonomy in a digital age. He is author of fifteen bestselling books on media, technology, and society including Program or Be Programmed, Present Shock, and, most recently, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. He made the award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, Merchants of Cool, and The Persuaders, wrote the graphic novels ADD and Testament, and originated concepts from "viral media" to "social currency." Rushkoff is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, where he founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism and hosts its TeamHuman podcast. Rushkoff won the Marshall McLuhan Award for his book Coercion, The Jacques Ellul Award for his documentary The Merchants of Cool, and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. 

A note to our patrons: LIVE from the NYPL programs begin promptly at 7p.m. We recommend arriving twenty minutes before the scheduled start time to get to your seats. In order to minimize disturbances to other audience members, we are unable to provide late seating.

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Check out our LIVE Shorts here!