I'm interested in social issues and politics in general, so it's natural to combine it with my professional work in computer science. However, I haven't published anything on the social impact of computing that could go on my resume. Mostly, I learn about it in an ad-hoc fashion. In Winter 1996, 1997, and 1999, I taught CS 492, a course in the social impact of computers, making heavy use of the Web. That helped.
Occasionally, I give talks to the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo. I did a general critique of the Net for them twice, and twice I spoke on gender issues in mathematics and computer science. Those were pre-Web days (for me at least), and my files on them are a combination of photocopies annotated by hand, physical slides, and typeset lecture notes. At some point, I may convert them to Web files, but at present they're not accessible.
I was invited by the CSC to speak at a forum they hosted on 15 February 1994 after five newsgroups were removed from UW computers due to concerns that they contained illegal material. The text of my remarks at that forum is self-contained, so I can make it available here. I developed those remarks into a much longer article that was published in the UW Gazette on 9 March 1994. A shorter version appeared in the Faculty of Mathematics Alumni Newsletter (Math Ties) in May 1994.
Of historical interest is an early article expressing my disillusionment with newsgroups that ran in the Gazette on 10 April 1991.
My 14 June 1995 talk to the CSC on "The Web as a cultural phenomenon" is now a Web document. If you don't want to read all five thousand words of it, at least look at the amusing anecdote which concludes it.
I was commissioned by the Toronto Globe and Mail to write a review of Derrick de Kerckhove's book "The Skin of Culture", which appeared on 8 July 1995. I even got paid for that one.
I gave a talk at the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference (March 2000) with the title "Thinking for ourselves: moving beyond corporate perspectives on technology", and one of the attendees asked me to post my slides. Rather than post the massive set of GIFs that PowerPoint considers an exported presentation, I prepared a summary of the points that appeared on my slide. This doesn't have any of my notes, which are too abbreviated to make sense to anyone else; when I have time I'll add them.
That request made me realize that I've given other talks that could be included here. Watch this space.