Title: Digital Materialities: Technologies, Economies, Ecologies
Lecturer: Graham Murdock (Professor of Culture and Economy at the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University)
Chairperson: LU Xinyu (Professor of Cornell-ECNU Center for Comparative Humanities)
Date: 1 pm, September 7th, 2016 (Wednesday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
The latest scientific evidence confirms that we are now rapidly reaching the point when the pace and scope of climate change will become irreversible, facing the planet with steadily rising temperatures that will threaten the sustainability of life. Digital media are pivotal to this crisis for two reasons. Firstly, their centrality to the coordination and control of every aspect of economic and social life, at every level, from the transnational to the person, depends on an increasingly dense and ubiquitous array of connections and machines - cables, satellites, drones, cloud computing installations, smart phones. All of these devices consume increasing amounts of scarce raw materials and energy and pose major problems of pollution and waste which feed into climate crisis. Secondly, the business models employed by the companies that dominate popular uses of the internet are based on increasing volumes of commercial advertising in an ever expanding range of forms, that taken together promote an entrenched ethos of consumerism that encourages over consumption more generally. This lecture explores these two key developments in digital media. It argues for a ‘material turn’ in their analysis that focus on the resources, energy supplies and patterns of disposability they depend on and asks how we might move towards a more sustainable communications system.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Graham Murdock, is Professor of Culture and Economy at the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, Visiting Fellow in Media and Communication at Goldsmiths London University and the recently elected as Vice President of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) one of the two major scholarly bodies in the field of communications research. He is well known for developing a critical approach to the analysis of culture and communication that combines insights from across the humanities and social sciences. He has taught around world having held the Bonnier Chair at the University of Stockholm and the Teaching Chair at the Free University of Brussels and been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Auckland, Bergen, California, Curtin Western Australia, and Wuhan and Chongqing. His writings have been translated into twenty languages. His recent books include; as co-editor, The Idea of the Public Sphere (Lexington 2010), The Blackwell Handbook of Political Economy of Communication (2011), Money Talks: Media, Markets, Crisis (2014), and in Mandarin, New Media and Metropolitan Life: Connecting, Consuming, Creating (2015). He is currently completing a book on Marx and a collection on communications and climate crisis.
