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Leading authority on Internet impact Lee Rainie to speak at UGA

Athens, Ga. – Lee Rainie, a leading authority on the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life will speak at the University of Georgia on November 9 and 10.

Rainie, founding director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, will deliver a lecture titled, “The New Media Ecology,” at 3 p.m. Thursday at the Institute of Higher Education, Room 101, Meigs Hall and at 9 a.m. at the College of Education, Room 601, Aderhold Hall.

The presentation covers the media and communications environment of today’s teenagers and young adults, and how that new environment has affected their expectations and behaviors about media, communication and creation.

In addition, the Project uses regular surveys to track online life. It regularly reports findings on subjects such as teenagers’ and senior citizens’ use of the internet, broadband adoption, trends in email use, how people employ search engines, use of the internet to gather news (especially about politics), blog creation and readership, and trends in music and movie file sharing.

The Project has issued more than 100 reports based on social issues and online activities. It also has focused research on important public policy questions such as public attitudes about trust and privacy online, development of e-government, attitudes about intellectual property issues, the impact of spam, and the status of digital divides. The Project is non-partisan and takes no positions on policy matters. All of its reports and datasets are available online for free atwww.pewinternet.org.

Rainie’s latest report, “The Future of Internet II,” discusses the findings of a survey of technology thinkers and stakeholders and what major problems they believe will accompany technology advances by 2020.

Prior to launching the Pew Internet Project, Rainie was managing editor of U.S. News & World Report. He is a graduate of Harvard College and has a master’s degree in political science from Long Island University.

His visit to UGA is sponsored by the Institute of Higher Education, the Office of Information and Instructional Technology of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. His talk in the College of Education is sponsored by the department of educational psychology & instructional technology.

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