Michael Sacasas is an independent scholar focusing on technology and culture. Michael joins Elise to talk about the way technology shapes our society. They discuss the role media can have in disintegrating a sense of the common good and why technology tends to reflect ourselves back to us. Together they ask: Is online “real life”? What constitutes reality in digital spaces? And what’s at stake when we refer to the digital as “space”?

• Digital and media environment

• Online identity formation

• Mediation

• Spatial metaphors for digital life

• Digitized relationships

• Philosophy of technology

• Temporal lag and immediacy

• Weaponization of digital memory

• Social media interfaces as “common things”

• The algorithmically mediated nature of social media

• Apathy and numbness

• Hyperreality and spectacle

• Acedia and doomscrolling

• Limits that we ought to embrace

• Making sense of the insurrection

• Narrative structure and databases

• National Mourning and public language

• Ordering our remembrances

Michael Sacasas’ newsletter, The Convivial Society “The Insurrection Will Be Livestreamed” by Michael Sacasas “The Analog City and the Digital City” by Michael Sacasas “Structurally Induced Acedia” by Michael Sacasas Nathan Jurgenson on “digital dualism” Postphenomenology Evan Selinger Don Ihde Peter-Paul Verbeek Marshall McLuhan Ivan Illich “The Scourge of ‘Relatability’” by Rebecca Mead Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman Lysistrata by Aristophanes The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt Digital humanist Corey Sparks Vladimir Nabokov Michel de Certeau Alasdair MacIntyre Commemoration of COVID-19 victims The Need for Roots by Simone Weil