History is a live show.
Ever notice that? Probably not. Me either. We wait for somebody—or many bodies—to write it down. Or to podcast it.
Remember “What’s on”? Not if you’ve never watched or listened to live news on a schedule. At this point in history, most of us don’t any more. If we care at all, we subscribe to podcasts for that. News commentary podcasters feed us the kind of stuff we want to hear. Same for what’s left of TV news. That the mainstream is now the redstream is beside the point.
Which is that it’s all digital. As Marshall McLuhan is said to have said (he didn’t exactly, but meant it), we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. He also said we live at all times in a media environment. The environment we live in now, far more than we ever lived in stone, aural, scribal, print or broadcast media, is digital.
Only it goes farther than that. We are now digital as well as physical beings. (To see how much, try living for a week without your phone.) The digital world we occupy is no less real than the natural one.
But, while we are natives of the digital world, we can hardly say we know it as well as we do the natural one, because it changes constantly. In fact, its business, to the degree it has one, is changing us—shaping us—for its own purposes. We are milk cows in its dairy farms.
This is why my wife and I, both visiting scholars with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, have been putting on a salon series every academic year since 2021. We want to liberate the digital world’s inhabitants from its dairy farms.
This year our theme is After Analog, as it says in the banner above.
I gave the first talk on Noveber 18, which is now up on YouTube. All happen at the Hamilton Lugar School for Global and International Studies. Here is the rest of the schedule:
December 9, Tuesday – Elettra Bietti (here’s the flyer)
January 22, Thursday – Eli Pariser
February 19, Thursday – Abbey Stemler
March 31, Tuesday – Helen Nissenbaum
April 16, Thursday – Judith Donath
I promise brilliance from all of them. Please be there. Live is best.
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