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Public Lecture

'The Great Tradition' or 'The Great Transformation'?: Reading trends in media history

A public lecture from Professor Paul Duguid (University of California, Berkeley)

The Swinburne Institute for Social Research and convenors of the 7th Australian Media Traditions Conference are delighted to present a public lecture from Professor Paul Duguid.

Tuesday, 22 November
Time: 6.30 - 8.00 pm
Venue: State Library of Victoria, Village Roadshow Theatrette (Map)

This is a free event but Bookings are essential. Please contact isrevents@swin.edu.au indicating the number of tickets required.

If we take media as a term for technology, we see change occurring at an almost exponential rate. If we take it, however, as a term for the institutional structure of journalism, much as the press has been used for many years, then we see change occurring much more slowly - too slowly, some would say, to survive. Historically, journalism has long battled to hold these competing forces - technological and institutional - together. Thus, as this talk will propose, looking at the past may help us contemplate the future.

Paul Duguid teaches a course on the History of Information with Geoffrey Nunberg at the University of California, Berkeley, and writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

The 2000 book he wrote with John Seely Brown, The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press), 'deserves to be one of the best-read books of the internet age', according to the Financial Times. It was included on a 2011 Wall Street Journal 'recommended reading list' on how businesses can harness technology to make the most of information. Writing in the New York Review of Books in 2010, Anthony Grafton said: 'Though the year 2000 did not bring the world's computers to a halt, it did form a milestone in the development of scholarship, thanks to two prescient books ... The Social Life of Information [and Peter Burke's] A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot...'.

Paul is also a professorial research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London; a visiting fellow in business history in the School of Management at York University (UK), and an honorary fellow of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development at Lancaster University School of Management. From 1989 to 2001 he was affiliated to the Office of Central Management at the famous Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).