Digital Technologies and the Life of The Mind

Join the Coach House Institute for the second in a series of Monday Night Seminars for Spring 2012. Tonight’s theme – ‘Digital Technologies and the Life of The Mind’.

7 May 2012, 6:00-8:00 pm
39A Queen’s park Crescent East, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 2C3

As Marshall McLuhan foresaw, the expanding ubiquity of digital media is reshaping the very fabric of society. What matters are not the (so-often fetishized) technologies, digital and social media, patterns of communication, and effects of information on society. What matters are the ways we respond. How will we fashion discourse, community, culture, authority & expertise? What will be the cartographies of learning, responsibility, and compassion in this digitally mediated landscape? What will happen to learning, to inquiry, to critical intellectual debate? Will it continue to be subserved by the university?

Discussants:

* Brian Cantwell Smith (Director, Coach House Institute);

* Robert Gibbs (Director, Jackman Humanities Institute, UofT).

* Probe: Carolyn Taylor (Masters student, Elliot Allen Institute of Theology and Ecology, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto)

The Monday Night Seminar series is an ongoing event offered by the Faculty of Information McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto running until Winter/Spring 2013. It invites intellectuals, (re)searchers, artists, practitioners and cultural activists to convene and engage in intellectual dialogues from edgy seminars to intense conversations, to imagine how we can exploit our familiarity with digital media and harness the technologies of change to unleash a vibrant future for profound, discontinuous, soul-redefining encounters.