Public Lecture Series "Taming the Machines"Webinar: Twitter is a Bad Game

21 January 2021

Photo: C. Thi Nguyen, cropped

We resume our “Taming the Machines” lecture series with Prof. Dr. C. Thi Nguyen’s talk “Twitter is a Bad Game” on January 21, 2021. Prof. Nguyen will speak about the gamification of our communication on Twitter via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts and how this increases our motivation to communicate while changing the very nature of our communication. When buying into Twitter’s gamification, we are shifting from complex and pluralistic values of communication to the narrower quest for popularity and virality, permitting technology – and the institutions behind it – to control the content of our values. C. Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He writes on aesthetics, social epistemology, games, trust, echo chambers, food porn, and social media. His latest book is “Games: Agency as Art,” published in 2020 by Oxford University Press.