Cyberlibertarian to Deliver Holmes Distinguished Lecture April 21

Journalism | March 09, 2011

The Department of Journalism and Technical Communication at Colorado State University welcomes Cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow as this year’s presenter of the Holmes Distinguished Lecture.  Barlow will speak at 3:30 p.m. April 21 in Behavioral Sciences room 131. The title of his talk is “The Right to Know.”

A retired Wyoming rancher and native, Barlow is a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He is the co-founder for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization that has been protecting the free flow of information on the Internet since 1990, and remains on the board of that organization. Since May 1998, he has been a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Barlow has been writing about Cyberspace since 1988 and was the first to apply that name to the global social space it presently describes. He has written extensively for major publications, and was on the masthead of Wired Magazine for many years.

Barlow is currently operating a technology forum called TTIVanguard, and is starting a company, Algae Systems, that aspires to turn sewage into carbon-negative jet fuel. He is the father of three daughters, and his primary aspiration is “to be a good ancestor.”

The Holmes Communication Technology Leadership Fund sponsors the Holmes Distinguished Lecture. Geoffrey W. Holmes is a former senior vice president of Time Warner, Inc., and a graduate of Colorado State University.  In 1999 he created the leadership fund in cooperation with the Journalism and Technical Communication Department to help students understand the importance of technology and its impact on the future of communication.