Dr. Joan Donovan is the Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns.
Joan Donovan spoke at the Boston Global Forum 10th Anniversary Conference, November 22-23, 2022 at Harvard University Loeb House “Manifesto AIWS Actions to Create an Age of Global Enlightenment”:
“Thank you so much. It’s an incredible honor to be here and thank you to everybody that’s arranged, the talks and ambassador congratulations on this award. I’m a bit of an outsider to this field, so I just want to let you know that I might come at this from a bit of a different perspective because I’m a sociologist. I’m not a technologist per se.
But I think a lot about technology and I think about how people use technology in bad ways.
Right? And so not just are we going to get more malware? I’m thinking about how other global stakeholders are going to be using this technology to create situations of competition, amplify divisions, push polarization so that they can leverage technology in order to disrupt society, disrupt governance.
And as I was listening and thinking about some of the work that I’ve done in the past on white supremacists who use DNA, ancestry tests. I did this study when I was at UCLA Institute for Society and genetics and not a lot of people thought “well, you know DNA, ancestry tests. These are great tools. These you know they teach you about your lineage.”