Levan Institute for the Humanities Book Chats—Jennifer Petersen, How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech

A discussion of Jennifer Petersen's new book, How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech (Duke University Press, 2022). The author will be joined in conversation by Xiaochang Li (Stanford University) and Siva Vaidhyanathan (University of Virginia), moderated by Nitin Govil (USC). Co-sponsored by the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication, the Center for Law, History and Culture, and the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life.

Registration is required. REGISTER HERE

About the Book: In How Machines Came to Speak Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech” have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal actions, algorithms, and data. She examines a series of pivotal US court cases in which new media technologies—such as phonographs, radio, film, and computer code—were integral to this shift. In judicial decisions ranging from the determination that silent films were not a form of speech to the expansion of speech rights to include algorithmic outputs, courts understood speech as mediated through technology. Speech thus became disarticulated from individual speakers. By outlining how legal definitions of speech are indelibly dependent on technology, Petersen demonstrates that future innovations such as artificial intelligence will continue to restructure speech law in ways that threaten to protect corporate and institutional forms of speech over the rights and interests of citizens.

About the Author: Jennifer Petersen is Associate Professor of Communication at USC and director of the Graduate Certificate in Science and Technology Studies. She researches the implications of media technologies for the law and the historical constitution of emotion and reason in communication research, law, technology and public culture. She has written extensively on hate speech, the First Amendment and media technologies, and the history of media technologies and communication research. Her current research focuses on the history of conceptions of agency and intelligence in artificial intelligence, and the implications of AI for legal constructions of personhood.

Open to attendants outside of USC. An excerpt of the book will be made available to registered attendants. Registration before the event is required. 

This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “Book Chats” series, conversations about new books published by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit https://dornsife.usc.edu/levan-institute/book-chats/.