Pizza and beverages will be served from 16:00, the talk starts at 16:30.
Rogers Brubaker is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the UCLA Foundation Chair. Brubaker has written widely on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, race, gender, populism, and – most recently – digital hyperconnectivity.
Brubaker’s new book Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents (published by Polity in November 2022) addresses digital hyperconnectivity—a defining fact of our time. The Silicon Valley dream of universal connection – the dream of connecting everyone and everything to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time – is rapidly becoming a reality.
In this book, Rogers Brubaker develops an original interpretive account of the pervasive and unsettling changes brought about by hyperconnectivity. He traces transformations of the self, social relations, culture, economics, and politics, giving special attention to underexplored themes of abundance, miniaturization, convenience, quantification, and discipline.
Topic of the talk: Digital hyperconnectivity has reshaped political life by transforming regimes of knowing, regimes of feeling, and regimes of governing. It has altered ways of knowing the public world by weakening epistemic authority, reinforcing epistemic suspicion and distrust, and eroding the foundations of a shared public world, contributing thereby to epistemic paralysis on the one hand and epistemic polarization on the other. Hyperconnectivity has altered regimes of public feeling by encouraging the expression and mobilization of moral outrage and thereby deepening partisan antipathy and affective polarization. And it has altered regimes of governing by enabling new modalities of algorithmic regulation, public and private. The talk concludes by highlighting the tension between the technocratic premises and modalities of algorithmic governance and the populist regimes of digitally mediated knowing and feeling and by specifying how hyperconnectivity can promote both populism and its seeming antithesis, technocracy.
