Critical Thinking in the Digital Age

Great hope and great trepidation have greeted the data and digital technologies transforming our lives. Though many of these transformations yield economic and social benefits, critics worry about what artist Jenny Odell calls “techno manifest-destiny,” a way of thinking that boasts an “impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.” These qualities—subtlety, ambiguity, complexity—are essential to critical thought, which lies at the heart of a healthy democratic society.

Join Humanities New York’s presentation of a conversation between best-selling author Jenny Odell and media studies professor Nathan Schneider on the role of digital technology in our lives, at a moment when it seems poised to overthrow our understanding of history, our participation in democracy, and even our sense of self. How can we respond to such encroachments, as individuals and as a community? What tools do we have to critically evaluate information, connect with others, and avoid distraction? Can we “consent to be governed” in a meaningful way in an era of deep fakes and smartphone addiction? How can we envision—much less enact—new possibilities under conditions that foreclose imagination? The humanities offer tools to navigate this landscape and locate its paths of resistance.

About the Speakers

Jenny Odell is a writer and artist whose work centers around the power of observation and attention in shaping our reality. Her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, is “a complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto” (New York Times Book Review). Her follow-up book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, answers the question, “What if you don’t have time to spend in quiet contemplation?”

Odell’s visual art has been exhibited at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the New York Public Library, the Marjorie Barrick Museum, Les Rencontres D’Arles, Fotomuseum Antwerpen, Fotomuseum Winterthur, La Gaîté Lyrique, the Lishui Photography Festival, and apexart. She has also been an artist in residence at Recology San Francisco (a.k.a. “the dump”), the San Francisco Planning Department, the Internet Archive, and the Montalvo Arts Center. From 2013 to 2021, she taught digital art at Stanford University.

In addition to her bestselling books, Odell’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Sierra, and other publications. She lives in Oakland, California.

Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the MA program in Media and Public Engagement. He is the author of four books, most recently Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life, published by University of California Press in 2024, and Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Bold Type Books in 2018. His recent scholarship has been published in New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, the Georgetown Law Technology Review, and Media, Culture & Society, among other journals. He has also reported for publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, along with regular columns for America. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale. He serves on the boards of Metagov, Start.coop, and Waging Nonviolence.

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*Ticket sales end 24 hours before the event on 10/21/24 at 7:00 p.m.

Host or Publisher Humanities New York