Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia.
He is the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), and The Googlization of Everything—and Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011). He also wrote Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). In addition, he co-edited with Carolyn Thomas the collection Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
Vaidhyanathan directs the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, which hosts a Democracy Lab, produces several podcasts, and publishes the Virginia Quarterly Review magazine. He has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and in documentary films including Terms and Conditions May Apply (2013), Inside the Mind of Google (2009), Freedom of Expression (2007), and the higher-education documentary Starving the Beast (2016). He was also portrayed as a character on stage at the Public Theater in New York City in the play Privacy (2016). He served on the board of the Digital Public Library of America from 2012 through 2018.
Vaidhyanathan has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bloomberg View, IEEE Spectrum, American Scholar, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, BookForum, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post, Esquire, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The Nation. He is a frequent contributor to public radio programs and has appeared on BBC, CNN, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, and ABC. He is currently a regular columnist for The Guardian.
After five years as a professional journalist, Vaidhyanathan earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has also taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Columbia University, New York University, McMaster University, and the University of Amsterdam. He is a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, he resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.
