Siva Vaidhyanathan (born June 16, 1966) is a cultural historian and media scholar, and is currently an associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia. From 1999 through the summer of 2007 he worked in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University, the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Columbia University. Vaidhyanathan is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and Salon.com, and he maintains a blog, [1]. He is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and to MSNBC.COM. He has appeared in a segment of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart [2] and is a fellow of the New York