TechnoPop: How Technology Re-makes Media
Featuring NPR and PBS Journalist Rick Karr
A Presentation of
Hammond, Indiana
Wednesday, April 27, 2011, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Student Union & Library (SUL), Room 327
Purdue University Calumet
Presentation:  From the steamship that brought news of President Lincoln’s assassination to Europe in just a few days … to the tweets that brought the world unprecedented detail from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, new technologies have regularly upended the established media order. Rick Karr argues that new technologies have two distinct impacts on media: they radically alter style – or aesthetics – and they disrupt economic power. In a talk that draws on his own experiences with technology (which began in the 1970s at Purdue Cal’s computer center) and his own reporting, Karr uses history to show where today’s technological revolution may be headed.
Speaker: Rick Karr’s work in public radio and television has extensively examined the effects that technology has on culture and the way we live. He’s reported on hackable voting machines for PBS’s magazine show Need to Know, explored transportation issues for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, covered copyright law for NOW with Bill Moyers, and examined stem-cell research for the PBS-Wall Street Journal collaboration Journal Editorial Report. Karr spent more than a decade as a correspondent and host for National Public Radio. From 1999 to 2004, he was the network’s lead arts correspondent in New York, where he reported on the ways in which digital technology and copyright law were changing the business and aesthetics of music and film. Prior to that, he hosted the groundbreaking NPR music and culture show Anthem, and even earlier in his career worked as a reporter at the network’s Chicago bureau. Karr was nominated for an Emmy award for his 2006 PBS documentary Net @ Risk, which made the case that internet infrastructure in the U.S. is falling far behind that of other nations. He teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and studied at Purdue University and the London School of Economics. Karr is a member of the songwriters’ collective Box Set Authentic and the band Treppenverter. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Admission is Free and Open to the Public!