SotF 2016: Online and Offline Spaces for Democracy

Edinburgh Skeptics Presents...

For our last talk from the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe we're having a look at how online and offline spaces work both for and against democracy courtesy of Ella Taylor Smith. If we think of social media as spaces – like rooms – we get a new perspective on what’s going on and why. This talk looks at what people are doing when they’re doing democracy, in online and offline spaces. What is it about these spaces that makes them useful or worrying for our democracies? Spoiler alert – going to talk about spaces being public or hidden and who pays for what.

Ella Taylor Smith has been researching how people use/could use the Internet to get involved in democracy, since 2001, at Edinburgh Napier University’s School of Computing. Last century she moved to Edinburgh in 1988, where she went to Art College, then worked as a chef.