Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff will tackle the pervasiveness of social media in our culture — for good and bad — Monday, April 6, at a free public lecture at MTSU.

Douglas Rushkoff

The 7 p.m. lecture, titled “Don’t Sell Your Friends: How Social Media Became Social Programming,” is planned for Room 221 of MTSU’s McWherter Learning Resources Center. A searchable campus map with parking details is available at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParking14-15.

Rushkoff is the author of “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology and culture. He’s known for coining terms and concepts including “viral media,” “digital native” and “social currency” and is a professor of media theory and digital economics at City University of New York, Queens College.

In both his books and lectures, Rushkoff frequently explores the themes of how to make media interactive and how to help people — especially children— effectively analyze and question the media they consume.

Rushkoff earned his doctorate in new media and digital culture from Utrecht University with a dissertation on “Monopoly Moneys: The Media Environment of Corporatism and the Player’s Way Out.” He received his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Princeton University and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in directing from California Institute of the Arts.

His credentials also include a postgraduate fellowship from The American Film Institute, a Fulbright award to lecture on narrative in New Zealand and a Director’s Grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Rushkoff’s visit is sponsored by the MTSU Distinguished Lecture Fund, the John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Studies at MTSU, the Tom T. Hall Writers Series, MTSU’s College of Mass Communication and College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of Electronic Media Communication at MTSU.

— Gina E. Fann (gina.fann@mtsu.edu)