The Politics of Interactivity in Cold War America - Fred Turner

Описание: Trends in Society & Information Technology Series:
The Politics of Interactivity in Cold War America
By Fred Turner, Professor in Department of Communications, Stanford University
Friday, October 9, 2015

Abstract:
Today we find ourselves surrounded by screens on our iPhones, our tablets, our desktop computers. Little do we know that we are living out the multimedia dreams of several dozen Cold War social scientists, a handful of Bauhaus artists, and the musician John Cage. This talk will track those dreams and the politics that drove them from World War II to the psychedelic sixties. It will lay bare the long-buried cultural roots of today’s multimedia revolution and in the process, provide a rich historical context for thinking about the design of highly interactive digital environments

Bio:
Fred Turner is a cultural historian and Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Since the late 1990s, he has been tracing the ways in which changes in computing and American culture have shaped one another. He is the author of several books, including the award winning From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and most recently, its prequel, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties.