Publics Archives - Public Seminar

Feature

Overhearing in the Public Sphere

Any conversation in any public sphere is doomed to entail consequences

January 3, 2019 • by Daniel Dayan

1. Overhearing, intruding, my interview & Goffman I was once invited to speak at a conference in Sigtuna, near Uppsala, in Sweden. The conference dealt with religious sociology and a few clerics were present. One of them was a famous Danish Imam, Abu Laban. He had ignited what came to be known ...

Feature

Smart Media Is a Pain

As machine intelligence advances, we encounter the painful limits of our social intelligence

November 22, 2018 • by Benjamin Peters

Public media discourse has been fairly agonizing. All sides seem beset by mobs of malicious morons: waves of fake news pounding against their believers, crafty hackers seeding chains of disinformation, the trollish alt-right cooptation of identity politics, and even a populous turnout at the US midterm elections that, no matter your political leanings, likely ...

Feature

Understanding Media in Dark Times

The extensions of men and women

March 16, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

The authoritarian threat in the United States and its resistance are actively being constituted through media, and the whole world is not only watching: it is actively participating. The Presidency of Donald Trump is not imaginable without Twitter. But also Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and, this week, the nation wide walk ...

Feature

A Post on Friendship, Love and Power

On the Power of the Powerless in Dark Times

February 2, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

“There are a great many things which cannot withstand the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene; there, only what is considered to be relevant, worthy of being seen and heard, can be tolerated…there are very relevant matters which can survive only in the ...

Education

Finding Value in Schoolhouses as Public Things

A Reply to Johann Neem

August 7, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

I am fully persuaded by Neem’s diagnosis of the current crisis in American public education, and hope we all take his lesson to heart. In this reply, I hope to augment and perhaps slightly shift the prognosis that his (and Honig’s) focus logically entails: that if we want to save ...

Finding Value in Schoolhouses as Public Things

Feature

Why Engage Public Anger

A reply to Chakravarti’s Introduction to ‘Sing the Rage’

August 1, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

“Sing the Rage” is a bold title for a bold book. It is no small provocation to thus entitle a book that argues for a more robust engagement with anger in public life in today’s democratic societies. The title is a further challenge for readers who recall the proem[1] to ...

Education

Twitter as the Medium and the Message

Or Twitter as The Public

April 6, 2017 • by Alysha Khodaiji

“Describe yourself in a sentence.” Teachers commonly use this phrase as an invitation to their students, presumably to get to know them better. All your thoughts, ideas, motivations, and aspirations, all condensed into one sentence. That is a lot of editing -- your gist can only contain the ‘best’ or ...

Education

Further Reflections on Truth, Politics and Education

Media and Publics III

February 6, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This past week was fascinating. We read Arendt’s essay “Truth and Politics,” along with a selection from Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday life. The students, Alysha originally from India, Lina, from Sweden, and the Julian from Los Angeles, wisely decided to draw upon the diversity of their experiences ...

Education

Media and Publics in Dark Times

An OOPS course

January 26, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

The course objective, as I put it in the planned syllabus (responding to an administrative mandate to include such statements): “The objective of this class follows the insights of Michael Oakeshott, the great British (conservative) philosopher, as he illuminated the problem of education and of the liberal arts. He observed that ...

Theory & Practice

On Media Monstration and the Politics of Small Things

An ongoing discussion with Jeffrey Goldfarb

March 14, 2014 • by Daniel Dayan

This post is the first of two making a series of points: Here I answer Jeff Goldfarb’s points in the post he devoted to our common classes. In the second, I will stress a couple of issues that have to do with my central concern: the role of media as ...

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