Signal&Noise.com: Evgeny Morozov and Paul Holdengraber in conversation
BUY TICKETS
On May 23, 2014 Spur Vancouver, in partnership with PEN Canada, presents a conversation between Paul Holdengraber, writer, curator, and literary programmer at the New York Public Library, and Evgeny Morozov – author of The Net Delusion and To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, the as they discuss how new technologies are changing the way we think.
Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 W Hastings Street, Vancouver
Friday, May 23, 2014 , 7 p.m.
General admission, $15
Student admission, $10
“The Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind,” wrote Nicholas Carr in 2008. “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.”
Much more optimistic views are everywhere today, from Wikipedian idealism to wilder visions of cybernetic intelligence, unfettered creativity and self-organizing utopias. But both sides share a sense that profound shifts are afoot. So with an increasingly customized but near-infinite Internet, what happens to originality? Does technology itself really “want” things, as Kevin Kelly memorably put it? And how do Internet-bred ideas shape today’s culture and politics?
Evgeny Morozov is contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.
In 2010-2012 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. In 2009-2010 he was a fellow at Georgetown University and in 2008-2009 a fellow at the Open Society Foundations (where he also sat on the board of the Information Program between 2008 and 2012). Between 2006 and 2008 he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online.
Morozov has written for The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. His monthly Slate column is syndicated in El Pais, Corriere della Sera, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Folha de S.Paulo and several other newspapers.
Paul Holdengräber is Director of Public Programs at The New York Public Library and founder and Director of LIVE from the NYPL. Since his arrival in 2004, he has reinvented the Library’s event series, transforming them into happenings, or as he likes to say, into “cognitive theatre.” Holdengräber has curated over 550 programs on such diverse subjects as Google’s digitization of American libraries, the ownership of culture, and themes such as Lust and Obituaries.