Ad blocking is a highly popular way in which markets today are speaking to marketing. Its voice is also very loud, and getting louder. So far, more than 200 million people worldwide block ads on the Web, at a rate increasing annually at 47% in the U.S. and 82% in the U.K. alone.

What is ad blocking saying, besides “no”? What are its causes and likely consequences? Doc Searls, who directs ProjectVRM at Harvard’s Berkman Center, believes ad blocking brings vast new changes to business online, based on individuals taking full charge of their lives there. Among other effects, advertising will diminish in importance as new and better forms of signaling between demand and supply start to emerge. In his talk he will outline causes and possible effects of those changes.

About the Speaker:
Doc Searls is a widely read and quoted journalist, author and evangelist for new technologies that improve markets by empowering individuals. He is the author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Basic Books, 2000, 2010), now part of marketing's canon. He is also Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society at UC Santa Barbara, and founder and director of ProjectVRM at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University since 2006. Currently, he is a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU. He is at work on a new book about the next stage of the Internet's evolution.

A light lunch will be served.

This lecture is the first in the new Digital Futures lecture series, co-sponsored by the School of Information and the department of Communication Studies in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts. It is made possible by funding from the John D. Evans Foundation.