October 3: Roberto Simanowski, “The Fateful Year of 1984. On Surveillance, FOMO, and the Pleasure of Screens”
Wednesday, October 3, 4:10 pm
Center for Digital Humanities, 344 Buttrick Hall
Roberto Simanowski, “The Fateful Year of 1984. On Surveillance, FOMO, and the Pleasure of Screens”
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uper Bowl commercials teach us how to conceive of surveillance. While Apple promises to fight Big Brother with a personal computer, Coca Cola invites us to think different, i.e. positive, about security cameras. The whitewashing of surveillance accompanies the “big brotherization” of Apple. This lecture discusses the symbolic value of 1984 and its link to the ongoing move from verbal to visual communication. It underlines that the television-screen is the sibling of the surveillance camera. It shows why the dystopian future we fear won’t be like Orwell’s 1984 but rather like Huxley’s Brave New World
Roberto Simanowski studied literature and history at the University of Jena, he holds a Ph.D. in literary studies (1998) and a Venia Legendi in media studies (2011). He was a research fellow at University of Göttingen and Harvard University, professor of German studies at Brown University and of Media Studies at University of Basel and City University of Hong Kong. In fall 2017 he joined the Department of Letters at PUC Rio de Janiero as visiting scholar. Simanowski is the founder and editor of the journal on digital culture and aesthetics dichtung-digital.org, his research areas are Media and Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Aesthetics, Multiculturalism, and the literature, art, culture and politics of digital media. His book publications in English include: Digital Art and Meaning. Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations (University of Minnesota Press 2011), Data Love. The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies (University of Columbia Press 2016) and Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy (Open Humanities Press 2016). His book Facebook Society (Berlin 2016) will appear with Columbia University Press in July 2018, his books Waste. A New Media Primer and The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas with MIT Press in October and November 2018.
Dr. Simanowski’s visit to Vanderbilt takes place in connection with the conference Memorizing the Future: Collecting in the 21st Century, October 4-7. See the conference website for more information.
Dr. Simanowski will also lead a special lunchtime discussion and workshop with Dr. Luciana Gattass-Simanowski, Algorithmic Autobiographies on Social Network Sites. Find more information about the workshop here.
Macintosh image credit Steve Garfield, shared under creative commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/