Events

Past Event

Rogers Brubaker - The Internet, Hyperconnectivity, and Their Discontents

March 25, 2025
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
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Allan Rosenfield Building (Room 440), Columbia University, 722 West 168th Street, New York

Event Description

Digital hyperconnectivity has reshaped political life by transforming regimes of knowing, regimes of feeling, and regimes of governing. It has altered ways of knowing the public world by weakening epistemic authority, reinforcing epistemic suspicion and distrust, and eroding the foundations of a shared public world, contributing thereby to epistemic paralysis on the one hand and epistemic polarization on the other. Hyperconnectivity has altered regimes of public feeling by encouraging the expression and mobilization of moral outrage and thereby deepening partisan antipathy and affective polarization. And it has altered regimes of governing by enabling new modalities of algorithmic regulation, public and private. The talk concludes by highlighting the tension between the technocratic premises and modalities of algorithmic governance and the populist regimes of digitally mediated knowing and feeling and by specifying how hyperconnectivity can promote both populism and its seeming antithesis, technocracy

Event Speaker

Rogers Brubaker, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration required. Please email [email protected] with any questions. 

Hosted by the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University.