Digital activist Quinn Norton to keynote NetHui 2013

Digital activist Quinn Norton to keynote NetHui 2013

Media release – 20 May 2013

This release is available online at http://tinyurl.com/as9elsh

InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) is proud to announce that one of the world’s foremost digital activists will visit New Zealand this July to deliver the international keynote at NetHui 2013.

US-based technology journalist and blogger Quinn Norton is best known for her work covering the global hacker collective Anonymous. She has written extensively on topics ranging from hacker culture, the Occupy movement and digital copyright, and is an exponent of the little known art of ‘body hacking’.

NetHui 2013 is being held at Wellington’s Town Hall, from 8 to 10 July. Norton will take the stage on the morning of the second day – Tuesday 9 July.

Titled ‘Encyclopaedias, Lolcats, Revolutions, and other Strange Consequences of an Open and Free Internet,’ her keynote address will explore the profound impact that online communities are having on human interaction, focusing especially on how the tools hackers have built are creating a new kind of ‘unintended cyborg’.

“From Anonymous to Open Source, Wikipedia to Occupy Wall Street, online communities are using the Open Internet to make unpredictable and powerful projects and movements,” she says.

“Our tools have always made us strange animals, but the networks that are crawling over the surface of the world make our communities strange, too. We are forming online collectives that act more like nature than nation-states, and often do things that are illegible to traditional power and organisations.

“Net collectives reverse our assumptions on how people act together. They act with agency at once, and social capital comes later. On the net, dissent is often integral to overall stability,” she says.

InternetNZ Acting Chief Executive Jordan Carter says it is a real fillip to have secured Norton as NetHui keynote. Internet users are increasingly involving themselves in online communities, and for those with an interest in the positive disruptive potential of this new communications medium her keynote is not to be missed.

To find out more about NetHui 2013 and to register, visit www.nethui.org.nz.

Members of the media interested in attending NetHui 2013 are asked to email campbell@internetnz.net.nz to secure a media pass.
ends

© Scoop Media