Nora Young and The Virtual Self

"We are at the dawn of a watershed change in the amount of data out there about us. It is created by us, about us. The stakes are high: will we use it for personal insight, and to build smarter, more sustainable communities, or will we use it for control, surveillance, and profit?"

That's the central premise of Nora Young (http://www.norayoung.ca/)'s insightful new book: The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives are Altering the World Around Us.

Nora Young will join us at our next Third Tuesday to discuss the issues around the data we knowingly - and often unknowingly - share as our use of digital devices and social media increases.

This is an important topic. We should not stand by and let others make decisions that will have real impact on us. Nora argues in her book, "The more digital our lives, the more complete the Data Map. ... By talking about this rapidly emerging future we can start to shape it. ... We can either accept passively what our data will be used for, or we can participate in defining the values we want our data collection to serve."

As usual for Third Tuesdays, we'll roughly follow this agenda:

5:30 - 6:00 Doors open - Meet Nora, book signing, and network with others who share your interests

6:00 - 7:00 Speaker introduction & presentation, followed by questions and discussion with participants

7:00 - 8:00 Book signing with Nora and networking

I hope you'll join us at Third Tuesday to be part of the discussion.

Attendees will receive a copy of The Virtual Self

That's right. Your admission fee pays for a copy of the book. All attendees will receive a copy of The Virtual Self.

About Nora Young

Nora Young leaves a lot of footprints on the social Web as well as mainstream media. She is the host of CBC's thought provoking Spark (http://www.cbc.ca/spark/) which can be listened to both on CBC Radio One and as a podcast. She co-hosts a personal podcast, The Sniffer (http://thesniffer.net/), in which she and Cathi Bond talk about trends they find interesting. On top of this, she blogs (http://norayoung.ca/), tweets (http://www.twitter.com/nora3000), is onLinkedIn. (http://www.linkedin.com/in/norayoung) I'm sure she's also on Facebook and many other places where I haven't foound her.

Thank you to our sponsors

As you know, Third Tuesday is a community-oriented, volunteer-driven event. And we wouldn’t be able to bring great speakers like Nora Young to Third Tuesdays across the country without the support of some like-minded sponsors. We’ve been lucky to have some great companies step up over the past several years to help us make Third Tuesday happen. Big thanks are due to CNW Group (http://newswire.ca/), Rogers Communications (http://rogers.com/), the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (http://www.cira.ca/), Radian6 (http://www.radian6.com/) and Cision Canada (http://www.ca.cision.com/) for making the 2011/12 Third Tuesday season possible.

We want students to be able to attend

Third Tuesday is a great opportunity to hear about the latest developments in social media and to network with business and thought leaders. And we don't want students to miss out on this opportunity. So, if you are a student and would like to attend, don't let the admission fee stop you. Simply present your student ID card at the time you sign into Third Tuesday and we'll refund your admission fee, courtesy of Thornley Fallis (http://www.thornleyfallis.com/).