Amit Schejter has been named as a co-director of the Institute for Information Policy, housed in the College of Communications at Penn State.
Schejter, an assistant professor, teaches courses on telecommunication regulation, the media and information industries, comparative and world media systems and media activism. In 2007, he earned the Deans' Excellence Award for Integrated Scholarship.
His research focuses on identifying regulatory responses to technological change; highlighting social inequalities and communication distortions created by them; and prescribing theoretically informed approaches to policy making that enhance fairness and equality. His studies have been widely published in both communication and law journals, cited in congressional and Knesset hearings and have dealt with the challenges raised by television, cable, the Internet, mobile phones and digitization in Israel, the United States, Korea, the European Union and acros wide international comparative settings.
Schejter joined the College of Communications in 2004 after more than a decade of service in the communications industry and academia in Israel. His background includes a decade of holding senior executive positions in the telecommunication industry in Israel, including general consel for Israeli public broadcasting and vice president of Israel's largest mobile operator. In addition, he served on and chaired a variety of public committees, counseled media and telecommunication entities in Israel and the Palestinian Authority and held the post of assistant professor at Tel Aviv University.
His books include "The Wonder Phone in the Land of Miracles" (co-authored with Akiba Cohen and Dafna Lemish, Hampton Press, 2008) and "Muting Israeli Democracy" (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming.)
The Institute for Information Policy (www.comm.psu.edu/iip), created in 1997, has conducted sponsored research and self-funded programs on the social implications of information technology, with an emphasis on the potential of information technologies for improving democratic discourse, social responsibility and quality of life. Earlier this year, the Institute conducted a one-of-a-kind conference that focused on the business and social aspects of video games.
Among the Institute's current projects are groups addressing "universal service," the effort to make broadband Internet service as widely available as telephone service, and the Future of American Communications Working Group, which will produce a volume outlining a new vision for communications policy in America and the practical steps needed to achieve it. The goal of the project is to produce a volume of work prescribing a comprehensive telecommunications policy agenda for the new federal administration to be entering office in January 2009, an agenda that emphasizes the potential of information technologies for improving democratic discourse, social responsibility and the quality of life--and the means by which information technologies can be made available to all Americans.
Other directors of the Institute are: Richard Taylor, the Palmer Chair of Telecommunications Studies and Law, a member of the Department of Telecommunications in the College of Communications, and John Bagby, a professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology.