(UW-Whitewater submission) The UW-Madison Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership and UW-Whitewater are pleased to welcome Siva Vaidhyanathan for a virtual lecture, “Cacophony: How Disinformation, Distraction, and the Heckler’s Veto Undermine Collective Thought” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 30.

This virtual lecture is free and open to public.  Please visit https://thompsoncenter.wisc.edu/events/ for details on how to attend.

A cultural historian, media scholar, and lecturer, Vaidhyanathan serves as the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and the director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues on public radio shows and news programs, notably the BBC, CNN and NBC. Siva has also authored several books, including The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) and Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.

His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Nation. Vaidhyanathan’s current project reflects major societal concerns related to the “global media ecosystem,” but touches on such issues as the prevalence of propaganda and misinformation (and its easy dissemination on social media) which further threatens to undermine democracy and destabilize governments across the world. Moreover, the lecture considers the importance of news and information literacy, which is fundamentally one of the most important issues of our time in an age when expertise and intellectualism is under attack.