Digital ethicist James Williams talks about the rise of bad social media

James Williams is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute. He studies the ethics of attention and persuasion in technology design and spoke with us about the rise of attention-grabbing advertising and media and how we can fight back against the onslaught.

I talked to him just before Thanksgiving for this enlightening episode of Technotopia.

Before fighting against bad advertising Williams worked at Google on “advertising products and tools.” His work now is aimed at reversing exactly what he built and he wants to use the tools he made to help fix advertising.

Technotopia is a podcast by John Biggs about a better future. You can subscribe in Stitcher, RSS, or iTunes and listen the MP3 here.