Category: NMCC + UO Events

Mark your calendars for Bruce Schneier’s lecture “Internet Security & Surveillance,” coming May 2014 as part of the Oregon Humanities Center series “Vulnerable.”

Computer security guru and writer Bruce Schneier explores cybersecurity and how living in an information society is changing our notions of national security and personal privacy. Schneier is currently helping the Guardian newspaper analyze the Edward Snowden NSA documents, and suggests that more revelations are on the way. http://ohc.uoregon.edu/OHCevents.html

UO Folklore presents a lecture by Robert Glenn Howard:
Back to the Newly-Digital Networked Normal
Tuesday, May 14th, 4:00 pm
Knight Library Browsing Room

From the beginning of recorded history, human beings appear to have been devising ever more complex ways to interact with each other, from physical mimicry, oral narration and musical instruments to books, movies, TV, and now so-called “new” media. Termed the “new folk culture” and “participatory culture,” media scholars are celebrating the new normal of network communication. But is it really new? Or has the age of durable media and commercial broadcasts only been an awkward silence in the long chatter of human history? If so, that silence has been broken by a digital roar. We can hear it in everything from homemade videos of ourselves playing guitar licks on YouTube to advice about how to treat sick kids in network forums. From protestors tweeting on the streets of Tunisia to Oregon teenagers sharing their videos on Facebook, all of us can again place the highest value on spinning our own vernacular webs of signification. In the process, maybe we will discover ourselves more tightly bound together; a global web that both tolerates the diversity of individuals and values the connections that weave us into a single human community.

Robert Glenn Howard (UO PhD, English, 2001) is Professor of Communication Arts and Director of the Folklore Program and the Digital Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His teaching and publications span the fields of Communication, Folklore Studies, Journalism, Rhetoric, and Religious Studies. Dr. Howard is the author of more than thirty academic articles and has published three books: Digital Jesus (2011), Network Apocalypse (2011), and Tradition in the 21st Century (2013).

January 17^th marks the first day of a three speaker series titled “New Media, New Concepts, and New Forms” held at the University of Oregon. Brown University professor Wendy Chun will be giving her talk “Imagined Networks, Affective Connections” in the EMU Fir Room (tentatively) from 12pm to 2pm.

Chun’s current work focuses on digital media, combining her past studies of Systems Design Engineering and English Literature. She investigates in her work “the relationship between cultural formations and technological artifacts, between theoretical concepts in the humanistic and technological disciplines, and between popular perceptions of technology and technological protocols.” Questions that have driven past projects include: “What is the impact of control technologies on mass media? What made the Internet, a communications network that had existed for years, a “new” or “exceptional” medium in the mid-1990s? How does the concept of “memory” cut across computational, biological and humanistic fields?”

Wendy Chun is the author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006) and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011).

(Information provided by Brown University)

The “New Media, New Concepts, and New Forms” speaker series is coordinated by Colin Koopman, Lisa Freinkel, and Carol Stabile and sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, Department of Comparative Literature, Center for the Study of Women in Society, Oregon Humanities Center, Wayne Morse Center, and the College of Arts & Sciences.

For more information on the speaker series, please contact Colin Koopman at koopman@uoregon.edu.

Wendy Chun
Imagined Networks, Affective Connections
Thursday, Jan 17th
12:00 pm -2:00 pm
EMU Fir Room (tentative)

Stay tuned for more information on upcoming speakers including T.L. Taylor, Comparative Media Studies professor at MIT.

NMCC will be offering New Media Art and Digital Discourses this winter 2013. Professor Kate Mondloch of the Art History department will be teaching the reading-intensive seminar, which focuses on the theory and criticism of art engaged with new technologies from the 1990s to the present.

This course will be listed under Topics and will satisfy one of the two core course requirements.

Click here for more information on the New Media Art and Digital Discourses course.