We’re excited to welcome the BBC World Service to our next Dragon Hall Debate featuring scholar, TV presenter and best-selling author Professor Mary Beard on Monday 13 February. The sold-out event, titled ‘Internet 2.0’ will be recorded and broadcast on their technological and digital news programme Click the following day (14 February) at 8.30pm GMT. 

‘Internet 2.0’ will open up debate around the positives and negatives of the internet, social media and our online world. Beard is joined by WCN Board Member Bill Thompson and UEA’s Paul Bernal to discuss everything from internet trolls to US presidential elections, Wikileaks to social justice.

Don’t forget to tune in!

Dragon Hall Debates are organised by the University of East Anglia in association with WCN.

About the speakers

A professor of classics at Cambridge University, Mary Beard is the author of the best-selling The Fires of Vesuvius and the National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated Confronting the Classics. A popular blogger and television personality, Beard gave the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. She lives in England.

Bill Thompson is a journalist, commentator and technology critic based in Cambridge. He has been working in, on and around the Internet since 1984. He currently has a weekly column, the BillBoard, which appears in the technology section of the BBC News website, and contributes to other publications both on and off-line, including The Times and The New Statesman. He writes a monthly column for Focus magazine and appears weekly on ‘Digital Planet’ (formerly called ‘Go Digital’) on the BBC World Service and occasionally on other radio and television programmes. Bill is the editor and systems administrator for the Working 4 an MP website. He is a visiting fellow in the Journalism Department at City University and a Trustee of the Cambridge Film Trust, organisers of the Cambridge Film Festival.

Paul Bernal is a lecturer in IT, IP and media law at the UEA law school. His speciality is internet privacy – from surveillance to social media, from the snooper’s charter to the right to be forgotten. His book on the subject, Internet Privacy Rights: Rights to Protect Autonomy, was published in March 2014.