TIME Editor Nancy Gibbs, Maidment Theatre July 30, 2015

TIME Editor Nancy Gibbs delivered a public lecture on 'Our tools, our brains, our souls: the transformations of technology' at Auckland’s Maidment Theatre on 5.30pm on Thursday 30 July during her visit to New Zealand as the 2015 John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow.

The John F Kennedy Memorial Fellowship was created following the death of President John F. Kennedy, for the purpose of bringing eminent Americans to New Zealand for speaking and teaching engagements in honour of the late President.

The Fellowship is administered by Fulbright New Zealand, and executed in partnership with the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade and the Embassy of the United States of America, Wellington.

Our tools, our brains, our souls: the transformations of technology.

All through human history, we have acquired tools before we fully understood their power. Nowhere is this more true than the digital tools that have changed everything about how we live, work, play, learn, shop, vote, parent. In the next five years, the amount of digital data will grow to 44 trillion gigabytes; more than a billion smartphones were sold last year. The promise of this technology is limitless, for growth, health, education, communication; but the changes are coming so fast that it is hard to step back and consider whether it is true that the Internet “democratizes the good and disrupts the bad.” How do we as families, communities, societies, monitor the impact of technologies that are so powerful and so deeply embedded in our daily lives?