Why our Tech-Driven World Needs the Humanities

About This Event

In this inescapably technological time, our lives are continuously altered by innovation. Although we acquiesce, we often do so with mixed feelings: can we realistically develop meaningful friendships on Facebook? Can personal privacy really be guaranteed by information anonymity? How does the permanent possibility of digitally connecting with others elsewhere alter face-to-face engagement?

Many attempts to understand the effects of technology on us appeal to external, quantitative metrics: How many hours people spend on Facebook, the ways in which reliance on GPS for navigation alters the brain, and so forth. In this lecture, our 2018-2021 Arnold Chair, Professor Kirk Besmer, will argue that critical self-reflection is necessary to fully understand our current technological situation and to respond to it appropriately—and that that kind of self-reflection is cultivated primarily through a study of the humanities.