Tuesday 17 October 2023 from 18.00 to 19.00
Lecture held in English
Belval, Maison des Sciences Humaines, Black Box
Speaker
Prof. Till Dembeck
Associate professor, Leiter des Instituts für deutsche Sprache, Literatur und für Interkulturalität
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Department of Humanities
Abstract
Media have a resounding effect on social relations. For example, the emergence of modern society resulted from the invention of the printing press. Today, many anticipate that ‘digitalisation’ will have similarly far-reaching effects, and this often leads to ethical reactions: ethics is to align digital technology with ‘human’ values. This reaction, however self-evident it may seem, must be questioned: not only is the ‘ethification’ of digital technologies a comparably weak reaction, worse, it impedes a clear-sighted assessment of the societal revolution underway. This lecture aims at offering a more sober, though potentially ‘unethical,’ look at the affordances of digital media.