Great hope and great trepidation have greeted the data and digital technologies transforming our lives. Though many of these transformations yield economic and social benefits, critics worry about what artist Jenny Odell calls “techno manifest-destiny,” a way of thinking that boasts an “impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.”
These qualities — subtlety, ambiguity, complexity — are essential to critical thought, which lies at the heart of a healthy democratic society.
Humanities New York will present a virtual conversation between best-selling author Jenny Odell and media studies professor Nathan Schneider on the role of digital technology in our lives, at a moment when it seems poised to overthrow our understanding of history, our participation in democracy, and even our sense of self. This event will take place on Tuesday, October 22, 2024, from 7 until 8:30 pm EDT in parson at VBI Theatre, 12 Vassar Street, in Poughkeepsie and also via online livestream.
How can we respond to such encroachments, as individuals and as a community? What tools do we have to critically evaluate information, connect with others, and avoid distraction? Can we “consent to be governed” in a meaningful way in an era of deep fakes and smartphone addiction? How can we envision — much less enact — new possibilities under conditions that foreclose imagination? The humanities offer tools to navigate this landscape and locate its paths of resistance.
Jenny Odell is a writer and artist whose work centers around the power of observation and attention in shaping our reality. Her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Melville House, 2019), is “a complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto” (New York Times Book Review). Her follow-up book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (Random House, 2023), answers the question, “What if you don’t have time to spend in quiet contemplation?”
Odell’s visual art has been exhibited at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the New York Public Library, the Marjorie Barrick Museum, Les Rencontres D’Arles, Fotomuseum Antwerpen, Fotomuseum Winterthur, La Gaîté Lyrique, the Lishui Photography Festival, and apexart. She has also been an artist in residence at Recology San Francisco (a.k.a. “the dump”), the San Francisco Planning Department, the Internet Archive, and the Montalvo Arts Center. From 2013 to 2021, she taught digital art at Stanford University.
In addition to her bestselling books, Odell’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Sierra, and other publications. She lives in Oakland, California.
Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the MA program in Media and Public Engagement. He is the author of four books, most recently Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life (University of California Press, 2024), and Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy (Bold Type Books, 2018).
His recent scholarship has been published in New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, the Georgetown Law Technology Review, and Media, Culture & Society, among other journals. He has also reported for publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, along with regular columns for America. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale. He serves on the boards of Metagov, Start.coop, and Waging Nonviolence.
You can register for this event here. Livestream ticket buyers will receive a link in advance of the event. Ticket sales end 24 hours before the event.
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