Michael Sacasas is an independent scholar focusing on technology and culture. Michael joins Elise to talk about the way technology shapes our society. They discuss the role media can have in disintegrating a sense of the common good and why technology tends to reflect ourselves back to us. Together they ask: Is online “real life”? What constitutes reality in digital spaces? And what’s at stake when we refer to the digital as “space”?
Digital and media environment
Online identity formation
Mediation
Spatial metaphors for digital life
Digitized relationships
Philosophy of technology
Temporal lag and immediacy
Weaponization of digital memory
Social media interfaces as “common things”
The algorithmically mediated nature of social media
Apathy and numbness
Hyperreality and spectacle
Acedia and doomscrolling
Limits that we ought to embrace
Making sense of the insurrection
Narrative structure and databases
National Mourning and public language
Ordering our remembrances
Michael Sacasas’ newsletter, The Convivial Society
“The Insurrection Will Be Livestreamed” by Michael Sacasas
“The Analog City and the Digital City” by Michael Sacasas
“Structurally Induced Acedia” by Michael Sacasas
Nathan Jurgenson on “digital dualism”
Postphenomenology
Evan Selinger
Don Ihde
Peter-Paul Verbeek
Marshall McLuhan
Ivan Illich
“The Scourge of ‘Relatability’” by Rebecca Mead
Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
Digital humanist Corey Sparks
Vladimir Nabokov
Michel de Certeau
Alasdair MacIntyre
Commemoration of COVID-19 victims
The Need for Roots by Simone Weil