Digital Diversity: Exploring Global Media By Starting With Culture and Community

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, assistant professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on internet freedom for the Huffington Post, an op/ed in the Washington Post on social media and the London riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on the myths of social media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a master's degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a doctorate from Harvard University.