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Susan Greenfield is a research scientist, author, broadcaster, and member of the United Kingdom House of Lords. Her work focuses on the neuroscience of consciousness and the impact of technology on the brain, along with research areas dealing with the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. She is CEO and founder of Neuro-Bio Ltd, a biotech developing a novel treatment for neurodegenerative disorders.

Greenfield has held research fellowships in the Department of Physiology Oxford, the College de France Paris, and NYU Medical Center New York. She has been awarded 32 Honorary Degrees from British and foreign universities and in 2000 was elected to an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians. Further international recognition of her work has included the ‘Golden Plate Award’ (2003) from the Academy of Achievement, Washington, the L’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur (2003), from the French Government, and the 2010 Australian Medical Research Society Medal.

Nicholas Carr writes about technology and culture. His new book, Utopia Is Creepy, collects his best essays, blog posts, and other writings from the past dozen years, providing an alternative history of our tech-besotted time.

Carr’s 2014 work The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us, examined the personal and social consequences of our ever growing dependency on computers, robots, and apps. His previous work, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, was a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller.

Carr has also written for The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Wired, Nature, MIT Technology Review, and many other periodicals. His essays, including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “The Great Forgetting,” have been collected in several anthologies, including The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best Technology Writing. In 2015, he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association.

Katina Michael is a professor in the School of Computing and Information Technology at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is also the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine editor-in-chief, and IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine senior editor.

Since 2008 she has been a board member of the Australian Privacy Foundation, and until recently was the Vice-Chair. Michael researches on the socio-ethical implications of emerging technologies and has written and edited six books, guest edited numerous special issue journals on themes related to radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, supply chain management, location-based services, innovation and surveillance/uberveillance.

In 2017, Katina was awarded the prestigious Brian M. O’Connell Award for Distinguished Service to the IEEE Society on the Social Implications of Technology (IEEE-SSIT).

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, and the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Her current research focuses on psychoanalysis and human-technology interaction. She has written several books examining the psychology of human relationships with technology, especially in the realm of how people relate to computational objects. She is an expert on culture and therapy, mobile technology, social networking, and sociable robotics.

Her newest book is the New York Times bestseller, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, which investigates how a flight from conversation undermines our relationships, creativity, and productivity.

Her previous works include Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other and Life on the Screen as well as Identity in the Age of the Internet; and Simulation and Its Discontents.

Eli Pariser is an author and Internet activist. His book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You, is a New York Times bestseller, and his TED talk on the same topic has been seen over 2 million times and was called one of the top talks of the year by TED curator Chris Anderson.

Pariser has also helped start the website Avaaz.org, an “online movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere,” with over 24 million members across the globe. He has served on the boards of MoveOn.org, the New Organizing Institute, Open Society Foundations, and a number of other organisations focused on social and political change.

Roger Clarke is a long-standing professional privacy and public interest advocate specialising in strategic and policy aspects of information infrastructure, data surveillance and privacy. After spending 1984-1995 as a senior Information Systems academic at the Australian National University, Clarke has since spent over 35 years in the IT industry, as a professional, manager, consultant and academic. He now works as a consultant, prolific author and public speaker on a wide range of technology and privacy issues. His academic work has provided a substantial library of community service information since early 1995, which attracts a lot of views and citations.

Clarke holds visiting professorships at the University of Hong Kong in eCommerce, at the University of New South Wales in Cyberspace Law & Policy, and at the Australian National University in Computer Science. He has also served as the chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation, a member of the advisory board for Privacy International and Electronic Frontiers Australia, as well as the board of the Internet Society of Australia.

Douglas Rushkoff is a technology media theorist, writer, lecturer, and documentary film-maker whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age. He is the author of fifteen bestselling books on media, technology, and society, including Program or Be Programmed, Present Shock, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. He is the creator of the award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders and Digital Nation.

Rushkoff is currently Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at the University of New York, Queens College. He has previously lectured at The New School University in Manhattan.

He is the recipient of the Marshall McLuhan Award for his book Coercion and the Jacques Ellul Award for his documentary The Merchants of Cool.

Lelia Green is an educator, professor, and a senior lecturer at the School of Communications at Edith Cowan University, Perth. She is the author of Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex and the editor of Framing Technology: Society, Choice and Change.

In her book, Green defines technoculture as the integration of new communication technologies into a society, as she explores the effects of the digital age on society, its structure, and policy creation.

Green argues that technological advancements are the result of the choices and priorities of the powerful social elite, who she identifies as the “A, B and C of social power” (the armed forces, the bureaucracy, and the corporate sector), showing that these powerful groups, rather than the whole of society, ensure that technological developments are implemented and accepted. Green also notes that with globalisation, these Western power elites are exporting their ideas and technologies to other cultures and societies around the world, and these societies in turn affect the way the technology is used.

Lewis Mumford was a sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Some of Mumford’s notable works are The City in History, Technics and Civilization, and The Myth of the Machine.

The Myth of the Machine is a two-volume series taking an in-depth look at the forces that have shaped modern technology since prehistoric times. The first volume, Technics and Human Development, was published in 1967, followed by the second, The Pentagon of Power, in 1970.

In these works Mumford shows the parallel developments between human tools and social organisation. His unique critique and insight is invaluable foundational reading on the subject of technology and society.

Clifford Nass was a professor of communication at Stanford University, and a renowned authority on human-computer interaction. He is widely known for his work on individual differences associated with multitasking and how technology affects the brain.

Nass was the author of three books: The Media Equation, Wired for Speech, and The Man Who Lied to His Laptop. He has also published over 150 papers in the areas of human-computer interaction, statistical methodology, and organisational theory.

Nass consulted on the design of over 250 media products for companies such as Microsoft, Toyota, Philips, BMW, Hewlett-Packard, AOL, Sony, and Dell; as well as conducting research in the areas of computer graphics, data structures and database design.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist. He is the author of 13 books, including Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers.

His influential newsletter “Crypto-Gram” and his blog “Schneier on Security” are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before the United States Congress on an array of technology and privacy issues, and has served on several government committees pertaining to technology and society.

Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an advisory board member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Andrew Keen is an author and commentator on the so-called “digital revolution.” He has written three books: Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo and his current work The Internet Is Not The Answer, the Washington Post called “an enormously useful primer for those of us concerned that online life isn’t as shiny as our digital avatars would like us to believe.”

Keen’s work explores the view that screen culture may be debasing culture, and is especially concerned about the way that the Internet undermines the work of learned experts and professionals.

He featured in The Truth According to Wikipedia, a documentary from 2008, and Truth in Numbers, 2010.

Natasha Schüll is a cultural anthropologist, and associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her book, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas draws on fifteen years of field research among compulsive gamblers and the designers of poker machines, to explore the relationship between technology design and the experience of addiction.

Schüll’s research and op-eds have been featured in such national media venues as 60 minutes, The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Forbes, Boston Globe, Salon, Chicago Tribune, Las Vegas Sun, 99% Invisible, NPR, WGBH, and WNYC.

Tristan Harris is co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, a not-for-profit that advocates for regulators and technology companies to avoid social media features and profit incentives that it sees as contributing to internet addiction, political extremism, and misinformation.

Having studied computer science at Stanford University while interning at Apple Inc, and also later working for Google, Harris has direct experience with working with some of the world’s largest technology companies and their products. A turning point in 2013, Harris sent around a presentation to a handful of co-workers which was titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.” In that presentation, Harris suggested that Google, Apple and Facebook should feel an enormous responsibility to make sure humanity doesn’t spend its days buried in a smartphone. Harris left Google in December 2015.

Jerry Mander is an activist and author, best known for his 1977 book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. His most recent book, The Capitalism Papers, argues against capitalism as a sustainable and viable system.

In Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Mander argues that many of the problems with television are inherent in the medium and technology itself, and thus cannot be reformed.

Mander spent 15 years in the advertising business, including five as president and partner of Freeman, Mander & Gossage, San Francisco, a nationally-known advertising agency.

Tim Berners-Lee is a computer scientist and engineer, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford.

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation and is a senior researcher and holder of the founders chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative, and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He is a founder and president of the Open Data Institute.

In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.