Due to the incoming weather event, Dr. Conor Barry’s 911 Public Lecture on “Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Media Disruption" has been postponed. The event will now take place on Wednesday March 18 at 7:00 PM in BMH 101.
Social media and now artificial intelligence platforms have introduced major social and political disruptions. Some observers have described the influence of these new technologies as entirely without precedent. To counterbalance this view, this talk will stress continuities recent disruptions bear with earlier media disruptions. While recognizing the unique contemporary impacts of social media and artificial intelligence, this talk will argue that these new developments in many ways echo the earlier social and political transformations that attended the invention of writing, mechanical printing and the first electronic media.