Cut and Paste: Making Sense of our Digital Realities
- Date: Thursday, November 22, 2018 - 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Building: Trent Student Centre
Room: Events Space 1.07
Members of the Department of Philosophy and Trent Philosophy Society are pleased to announce the third of three Ryle Lectures
Paste: Designing a Digitally Mature Society
By cutting and pasting our analog realities, digital technologies lower the constrains and increase the possibilities (affordances) to create new and better realities. We have more freedom to build and shape our world because the digital power to “cut and paste” leads to a significant increase in the possibility of design. So, in this third lecture, I shall explain that our age is the age of design, not just invention or discovery, the other two forms of innovation. I shall argue that it should also be the age of good design of a digitally mature society. Against this background, I will criticise recent forms of populist “pasting” political agency by linking sovereignty (popular vote) and governance (e.g. in American politics, with Trump, in the UK, with Brexit, and in continental Europe, with illiberal democracies) in some sort of digital direct democracy. Instead, I shall suggest that the digital blue is a great ally of the environmental green. The two work best in tandem. And if the Cuenvironment, it will be because the blue and the green will have created a good marriage between technology and nature. It can be done. There is just no time to waste.
delivered by
Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford
Professor Floridi directs the Digital Ethics Lab of the Oxford Internet Institute, and is Professorial Fellow of Exeter College. He is also Turing Fellow and Chair of the Data Ethics Group of the Alan Turing Institute and has recently served as ethics adviser to companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and Google, the UK government and the European Union on cutting edge policy issues surrounding the ethics of digital technologies. His areas of expertise include digital ethics, the philosophy of information, and the philosophy of technology. Among his recent books, all published by Oxford University Press (OUP): The Fourth Revolution - How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (2014), winner of the J. Ong Award; The Ethics of Information (2013); The Philosophy of Information (2011). His most recent book, The Logic of Information, will be published by OUP in 2019.
The Gilbert Ryle Lecture Series was established by the Philosophy Department at Trent in 1977 in honour of the late Gilbert Ryle. This year’s lectures are supported by the Office of Provost & VP Academic, the Dean of Humanities, the Cultural Studies Department, Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics, Lady Eaton College, and by funds from members, alumni, and friends of the Department of Philosophy.
CONTACT INFO:
Kathy Axcell, Academic Admin. Assistant, Philosophy
philosophy@trentu.ca; 705-748-1011, x7166
Posted on September 18, 2018