Karlin Lillington

Lillington taught at San Jose State University in the early 1990s, while pursuing her PhD, and it was at this stage that she secured her first e-mail account and pre-World Wide Web Internet access, and her interest in matters of technology developed from this.[6] She had worked in student journalism at UC Santa Barbara, including holding the post of editor of The Daily Nexus paper,[5] and of the biweekly magazine, Portal.[9] She began to work in professional journalism while waiting to defend her PhD thesis in Ireland.[6]

Her work for The Irish Times, comprising hundreds of pieces, dates back to at least 1996. The first article in the paper's archives was on the arts, specifically the launch of the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature,[10] while the majority were on the interface of technology with society and business.[11] She has, however, also written in other areas, and sometimes followed up on such pieces, writing, for example, on the need for greater animal welfare control of puppy and horse breeding in 2004, and, frustrated that her article was still widely quoted because the problems had not changed, returning to the topic in 2017.[12]

Lillington achieved prominence as the paper's technology correspondent,[13] and in Prof. Terence Brown's detailed history and review of the Irish Times and its influence as Ireland's newspaper of record, he credited Lillington with a broad public impact: "information technology in the 2000s became a major news story ... reported on expertly in the Irish Times by Karlin Lillington, a young Californian who had come to Ireland to study its literature, who had carved out a career for herself explaining the communications revolution to the Irish public. Middle-aged readers were familiarized in her lively columns with the argot of a new field: 'spam', 'identity fraud', 'downloads', 'search engine', ..."[14] Brown further highlighted a selection of her articles, including "Our Past Is Not So Far Behind Us", which mused on Ireland's past emigration situation, and the new technology multinationals, on the potential conflict between blogging and journalism, and on the conflict between Ireland's need for immigrants to power "new economy"-based growth and fears of the potential impact of such migration.[14]

Lillington wrote regularly for The Guardian from at least 1997. She has also produced articles for Wired,[15] New Scientist, Salon.com, Red Herring, the Sunday Business Post, the Sunday Times and many other outlets.[2][16] She wrote an extensive essay, Ireland, Technology and the Language of the Future for journal The Irish Review.[17]

Lillington has written one-off pieces which bring together her literary studies and technology, such as a discussion around James Joyce and the concept of hypertext,[18] and on the digital arts, including an interview with the founding director of the Arthouse Multimedia Centre, Aileen MacKeogh,[19] and a later article on the demise of Arthouse.[20] She has been a speaker at many conferences and summer schools, including the Government of Ireland's invitation-only Digital Summit[21] and the MacGill Summer School.[22]

Lillington has raised a number of privacy concerns, especially around social media, and also online platform nuisance issues, and cancelled her account on LinkedIn over the latter.[23] Her work also grounded the Digital Rights Ireland appeal to the European Court of Justice which resulted in the voiding of the EU Data Retention Directive.[24][1] In 2018 she was one of the expert witnesses called before the Grand International Committee on Disinformation, and the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment, speaking about security and privacy risks.[25]

Lillington has also appeared on BBC and RTÉ radio, and on television with RTÉ and TV3.[2] In 2009 she produced her own series of podcasts, technoculture, including interviews with Chris Horn of IONA Technologies and leading designer Professor Anthony Dunne of Dunne & Raby,[26] and has participated in other podcasts, such as a memorial for Mary Mulvihill with Róisín Ingle,[27] and two concerning pets.[28]