Lecture on June 15, 2022
Digital Media and the Rise of Authoritarian Individualism
Prof. Dr. Fred Turner (Stanford University, CA, USA)
About the lecture
In the early 1950s, American cyberneticists agreed: digital computers modeled and foreshadowed the rise of a levelled, harmonious, democratic world. Today of course, we know better. The massive integration of networked computing has hardly brought the peace and prosperity they hoped for. It has instead helped fuel a seemingly contradictory rise in expressive individualism and in authoritarian regimes. This talk traces the cyberneticists’ dream of digitized democracy from Norbert Wiener’s MIT to Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Along the way, it shows how that dream has not only shaped the rise of social networks, but helped challenge the institutions on which democracy depends.
About the speaker
Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of five books: Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (with Mary Beth Meehan); L’Usage de L’Art dans la Silicon Valley; The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s.
copyright: Fred Turner
Wednesday, 15. June 2022, 18:15-19:45 (CEST)
Address for joining us on-site:
Flügelbau West, 2. OG, Raum W221
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg