Joel Reidenberg’s remarks at the Greater Good Gathering conference were mentioned in Nonprofit Quarterly article. Reidenberg addressed how technology may create privacy concerns.
Many NPQ readers know that their fellow activists are in search of new forms for collectively achieving social good, ones less likely to replicate the very problems we seek to address and more likely to bring about the future we wish to create together. Last weekend, in Providence, Rhode Island, a discussion took place that we thought we ought to sit in on: A group of students, academics, business leaders, and activists …. came together for what was proclaimed the inaugural Greater Good Gathering.
Organized by Eric Schnurer, a journalist, social critic, public policy consultant, and Brown alumnus, the conference aimed to look “deeply and cross-disciplinarily at how the means for addressing and promoting the Greater Good may be changing in today’s world—and that includes the ‘technology’ of how we, as multiple individuals, collectively interact and govern ourselves—and how to address and adapt to those changes.” In short, the conference sought to explore what it means to pursue the public good—and how to do so—in the twenty-first century.
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The panel included Marc Dunkelman, a Fellow of International and Public Affairs at Brown; Fordham law professor Joel Reidenberg; Brown sociologist Michael Kennedy; and Macky McCleary, administrator for Rhode Island’s public utility division. A lot of the discussion focused on technology as a driver of change—both how it has disrupted the media environment (i.e., the end of the postwar era of three dominant television broadcast networks) and, perhaps more fundamentally the way people relate to each other. Reidenberg, for example, pointed out that in 1959, the Supreme Court decided in NAACP vs. Alabama that the NAACP had won the right to keep its membership list private to protect its members’ association rights; now, Reidenberg said, technology makes the privacy that NAACP members enjoyed hard to maintain.