Genevieve Bell at ANU Exploring Australia’s Digital Futures

Dr Genevieve Bell has announced she will be joining us at the Australian National University as a Professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, while retaining a role at Intel.

I first came across Dr. Bell, at the Realising Our Broadband Future forum, in Sydney, 2009:

"For me the event ended on a positive note with Genevieve Bell, on e-Community. It was refreshing to hear ideas about broadband for people to use, rather than as something done to them."

Dr. Bell, was the first speaker at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, April 2010, where I wrote:

"One insight was that the people in the growth areas for Internet use in Asia live much more densely and that English was not longer the dominant language of the Internet. Western, and particularly American, ideas of how information is organised, meaning is expressed will not necessarily continue to dominate the Internet.

Genevieve argued that old forms of media, such as television, will live on. Rather than television being subsumed as a VOD service, TV is influencing the design of computers and the Internet."

The next week I bumped into Dr Bell at the State Library of South Australia. What I had not realized was she had been the state's Thinker in Residence on South Australia’s Digital Futures (I was there to talk about open source for South Australasian defence industry).