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Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation, University of Toronto, 55 St George Street, Toronto, ON
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Mark Kingwell, author of Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface, will join Romona Pringle (Ryerson University) and Douglas Rushkoff (City University of New York) for the More Social, More Human panel at the 20th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association. Mark Kingwell is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Offering a timely meditation on the profound effects of constant immersion in technology, also known as the Interface, Wish I Were Here draws on philosophical analysis of boredom and happiness to examine the pressing issues of screen addiction and the lure of online outrage. Without moralizing, Mark Kingwell takes seriously the possibility that current conditions of life and connection are creating hollowed-out human selves, divorced from their own external world. While scrolling, swiping, and clicking suggest purposeful action, such as choosing and connecting with others, Kingwell argues that repeated flicks of the finger provide merely the shadow of meaning, by reducing us to scattered data fragments, Twitter feeds, Instagram posts, shopping preferences, and text trends captured by algorithms.