Ethics in a digital world will be the topic of an Illinois professor’s presentation Thursday, April 19, at UW-Stout.
Bastiaan Vanacker’s talk, “Do We Need a Digital Ethic for a Digital Age?” will be from 1 to 2 p.m. in the Northwoods Room of the Memorial Student Center.
Vanacker, co-editor of the book “Ethics for a Digital Age,” is an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago and director of the school’s Center for Digital Ethics and Policy.
He has a Ph.D. and master’s degree in mass communications and journalism from the University of Minnesota, along with an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Ghent in Belgium.
His doctoral dissertation focused freedom of speech and the Internet, including differences between the United States and the European Union. He examined “questions of where to draw the line both ethically and legally between what speech can be tolerated in the public sphere and what speech should be banished from that public sphere and how it can be done without invading our crucial freedoms.
“This has always been of interest to me, be it hate speech, be it bullying, be it libelous speech, be it offensive cartoons. I find these questions interesting once we go towards a global society which allows people to have different sensibilities about these things. Somehow, we have to figure these things out,” Vanacker said in a 2015 interview with the Niagara Foundation.
The event is sponsored by UW-Stout’s Center for Applied Ethics.
The center will host another speaker, Brian Southwell, who will present “The Peril and Persistence of Misinformation,” at 1 p.m. Tuesday, May 1, in the student center.
###
Photo
Bastiaan Vanacker
