The Critical Life of Information

Friday, April 11, 2014

WLH 309 (100 Wall Street)

10:00 am-6:00 pm

An interdisciplinary workshop that will consider questions of scale posed by the rise of Big Data as a cultural and political force. 

The immensity of the proliferation of bits of raw information that is fundamental to current digital environments is at a scale that in earlier eras would have been characterized as sublime. Big Data also corresponds to scales of globalization with its heretofore unthinkable geographical expanses and inequalities, suddenly crystallized in local crises.  Scholars have argued that the geographical scale of accumulation has been changing and that hierarchies of scale are appearing that reveal the specificity of capital at the present time.  This, in turn, requires a re-scaling and re-conceptualization of life.  The workshop will address how new notions of information as property, and its harvesting from people in contexts ranging from shopping to health care to social media, condition humanistic inquiry and its concepts of the individual and the collective.
 

Space is limited and registration is required.  Register via the online registration page.

Schedule of Events