Virginia Heffernan

National Correspondent for Yahoo News! Author of Magic and Loss:The Pleasures of the Internet

Magic and Loss:The Pleasures of the Internet

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Virginia Heffernan provides an original perspective on the most influential and least understood medium of our lifetime. She treats the Internet not merely as a new technology or as a business tool, but as a cultural object -- a collaborative work of art that has "its own rules, conventions, implications." Heffernan does for the Internet what Pauline Kael did for movies, what Marshall McLuhan did for television. She helps us rethink this new medium: its enormity, its effect on society, and our place in it.

Virginia Heffernan is now the national correspondent for Yahoo! News. She is also a former contributor to The New York Times. Previously, she wrote The Medium column for The New York Times Magazine, from 2006 to 2011, and, before that, was the Times' TV critic. She's regularly asked by a range of institutions -- universities, libraries, Fortune 100 corporations, political organizations, ad agencies, even law firms -- to speak about leveraging the intrinsic capabilities of the Internet for cultural, political and professional purposes. A former editor at Harper's and Slate, she has her Master's and a Ph.D, in English literature, from Harvard. Her book, tentatively titled, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet, will be released in 2012.

Virginia Heffernan Speech Topics

The Pleasures of the Internet

In the past five years, the Internet has morphed from merely an extension of traditional media, into its own full-fledged civilization. It is among mankind's great masterpieces -- a massive work of art. The Internet has "a poetics, a scale, a palette, a rhythm, a sensibility, a system of metaphors and an emotional range." We all inhabit this fascinating place. But its deep logic, its cultural potential, and its societal impact often elude us. In this urbane and probing talk, Virginia Heffernan presents an original and far-reaching analysis of the Internet, unlike any that has come before. She shows how the Internet is much more than a new technology or new business. It's a ubiquitous yet seldom examined world that is profoundly changing the way we live.

The Internet: Understanding the Medium for Businesses

Many companies underestimate how immersive and robust Internet culture is. They fail to recalibrate their messages for an online world that is rapidly displacing traditional media as the hub of conversation, content viewing, shopping. In this talk, Virginia Heffernan shows businesses how to capitalize on the intrinsic (and limitless) possibilities of the Internet. What are the important distinctions between the Internet and, say, television or print? How do Internet users think, behave, search, watch and consume? Plain spoken and lively, Heffernan ofers corporate audiences -- product sellers, service providers, content producers -- an abundance of insight and real-world examples. The Internet is not just a reformation of stuff found in the real world. The Internet is its own world, with its own rules of engagement, its own expectations. It's a force to be reckoned with -- and profited from.

VIDEOS

ARTICLES

"E-readers Better Than Books Says NYT Columnist" - The Masthead

"Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade" - The New York Times

"AdWeek Profiles The New York Times' Virginia Heffernan" - AdWeek

"The Aesthetics of the iPad" - The New York Times

"Trust Busting" - The New York times

"Uploading the Avant-Garde" (YouTube) - The New York Times

"Facebook Exodus" - The New York Times

"Hashing Things Out" (Twitter) - The New York Times

Tina Fey Profile for The New Yorker

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GAYLE LEMMON at TEDxWOMEN

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