Webby Awards
Tiffany Shlain~ On Being
April 2, 2016
When Tiffany Shlain thinks of her favorite quote from naturalist John Muir, she thinks of the internet: “When you tug at a single thing in the universe, you find it’s attached to everything else.” As a filmmaker and founder of the Webby Awards — the “Oscars of the internet” — she is committed to reframing technology as an expression of the best of what humanity is capable, with all the complexity that entails. With her young family, she has helped popularize the practice of the “tech shabbat” — 24 unplugged hours each week. Her perspective on our technology-enhanced lives is ultimately a purposeful and enriching one: the internet is our global brain, towards which we can apply all the wisdom we are gaining about the brains in our heads and the character in our lives.
‘Tiffany is the founder of the Webby Awards and a co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. She has directed and co-written 28 films, some with accompanying books, including “The Science of Character,” “Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks,” and the feature-length documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology.’
(Listed by NPR as one of the best commencement speeches ever.)
UC Berkeley’s 2010 Commencement speech calls for Moxie. Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is an acclaimed filmmaker, artist, founder of The Webby Awards, co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and a Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute.