Censorship, Privacy, National Security & Other Dilemmas of the Information Age

With support from the School of Information and Library Science

September 22-23, 2006

A salient characteristic of the information age is an apparently infinite capacity for technical innovation. We inhabit a universe of ones and zeroes and packet — switching unimaginable to previous generations. But our digital world has an undercurrent of social and political dilemmas arising from attendant social issues such as censorship, privacy, identity (personal, medical, and financial), national security, data profiling, the ownership of ideas, and even creativity itself.

In partnership with the UNC School of Information and Library Science — the leading program of its kind in the country and now beginning a year-long series of events celebrating its 75th anniversary — the Humanities Program invites you to explore the values and principles by which we create, share, and archive information.

For more information about the 75th anniversary of the School of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill, please visit http://sils.unc.edu/news/releases/2006/07_75thannounce.htm.

The tensions between personal privacy and the public good, for example, underscore the webs of information that we use daily and that have enormous potential for good as well as harm. What should we do to ensure that cherished values such as the right to privacy are not overrun by greed, carelessness, or misguided intentions? In today’s charged political climate, what are we to make of government programs such as domestic electronic surveillance? To be more specific, how should the Bush Administration use the legitimate privilege of state secrecy in dealing with lawsuits that might endanger national security? Turning to related questions such as the ownership of technology in the information age, we’ll examine two celebrated instances — the Microsoft antitrust settlement and the granting of patents for DNA molecules. Because of the tendency in law to understand technological ideas as written texts, our legal institutions have struggled to respond to the assertion of property rights in emerging technologies. Finally, our seminar will consider the impact of information technology on health care. By way of analysis and analogy, we’ll consider how informatics — a crossroads of human creativity, medical science, and digital technologies — has improved patient safety and clinical efficiency. At the same time, the development of medical informatics has reduced person-to-person interaction between physicians and patients. How should we handle this dilemma, which paradoxically seems both to strengthen and constrain the practice of medicine in the information age?

Topics and Speakers

The Spider’s Web of Privacy and Censorship: The Poison Powers of the Information Age
José-Marie Griffiths, Professor and Dean, School of Information and Library Science

National Security, Secrecy and the Law
Scott Silliman, Professor of the Practice of Law and Executive Director, Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security, Duke University

Rhetoric and the Law: How the Law Reduces Ideas to Writing
Andrew Chin, Associate Professor of Law

Is Creativity in Jeopardy? The Information Age, Medicine, and Music
Robert G. Berger, Professor of Medicine and Director of Medical Informatics, UNC Health Care System

Dilemmas of the Information Age
Dean Griffiths, Professors Silliman and Chin, and Berger


Time and Cost

4:30 p.m., Friday, September 22, through 1:00 p.m., Saturday, September 23, 2006. The tuition is $120.00 ($105.00 before September 13). The optional dinner is $20.00. Scholarship tuition for teachers is $60.00 ($52.50 before September 13). 10 contact hours for 1 unit of renewal credit.

For information about lodging click here.

Co-Sponsored by the General Alumni Association.
For information about GAA discounts and other scholarships available to Humanities Program participants, click here.

Register for this seminar.