Virginia Heffernan provides an original perspective on the most influential and least understood medium of our lifetime. She treats the Internet not merely as a new technology or as a business tool, but as a cultural object — a collaborative work of art that has “its own rules, conventions, implications.” Heffernan does for the Internet what Pauline Kael did for movies, what Marshall McLuhan did for television. She helps us rethink this new medium: its enormity, its effect on society, and our place in it.

Virginia Heffernan is now the national correspondent for Yahoo! News. She is also a former contributor to The New York Times. Previously, she wrote The Medium column for The New York Times Magazine, from 2006 to 2011, and, before that, was the Times’ TV critic. She’s regularly asked by a range of institutions — universities, libraries, Fortune 100 corporations, political organizations, ad agencies, even law firms — to speak about leveraging the intrinsic capabilities of the Internet for cultural, political and professional purposes. A former editor at Harper’s and Slate, she has her Master’s and a Ph.D in English literature from Harvard. Her book, tentatively titled, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet, will be released in 2012.