This lecture will be followed by a reception in Welch Building.

The shift of the basis of public life from slow and centralized print and audiovisual media to faster, ubiquitous, distributed, user-generated short-form word and video material has been widely noted. I want to ask what the new mode of incessant documentation of raw behavior means for the possibility of both forgiveness and the collective learning process essential to public deliberation. If every word or deed is frozen in its first draft, what then? Some consequences are the preeminence of the “statement” as a genre or apparently trustworthy speech, the recoding of common knowledge as corrosive secrets whose exposure is worried to have damaging effects, and an obsessive public hermeneutics of small nonverbal gestures at the expense of speech. Is a reformist or redemptive rethink of this communication infrastructure possible or are we stuck?  This talk might not answer that question, but it will tease it in many ways.

John Durham Peters is María Rosa Menocal of English and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and, most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), co-authored with the late Kenneth Cmiel, as well as numerous essays and articles.