KMDI & TORCHI Lecture with Ethan Plaut: Designed to Disconnect

Designed to Disconnect: Technologies of Non-Use and Communication Avoidance 

This message likely arrives amid a wave of email; it too was typed as if pulled by an undertow. We often deride our resignation to the pressures of over-connection as an “internet addiction” to be met with “self help,” but digital disconnection is better understood as an extension of our fundamentally human activity of avoiding communication. “Information overload” is older than commonly recognized, and although digital media today shoulder much blame for this, those very same technologies can be turned around and leveraged as tools of healthy disconnection. Still, the uneven distribution of technologies and opportunities to access the internet we usually call the “digital divide” has a flipside wherein solitude and its tools become luxuries unavailable to the poor and over-connected who cannot untether from their work. Dr. Ethan Plaut visits from Stanford University to deliver this lecture applying historical insights to new ways we are unplugging today and might yet develop to preserve space for solitude in our digital tomorrow.

LOCATION:
Bissell Building, room 205 University of Toronto
140 St. George Street,
Toronto, ON
M5S 3G6