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John  Durham Peters

Considering Forgiveness in a Time of Ubiquitous Recording

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
Department of Philosophy, Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, Institute of Communications Research
Location
Campus Instructional Facility, Room 4039
Date
Oct 15, 2025   5:30 - 7:30 pm  
Contact
John Schwenkler
E-Mail
jschwenk@illinois.edu
Views
228
Originating Calendar
Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age event calendar

Join us for a lecture in the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age Speaker Series with John Durham Peters.

Considering Forgiveness in a Time of Ubiquitous Recording

The shift of the basis of public life from slow and centralized print and audiovisual media to faster, ubiquitous, distributed, user-generated short-form word and video material has been widely noted.  I want to ask what the new mode of incessant documentation of raw behavior means for the possibility of both forgiveness and the collective learning process essential to public deliberation.  If every word or deed is frozen in its first draft, what then?  Some consequences are the once ubiquitous genre of the “statement” as apparently trustworthy speech, the recoding of common knowledge as corrosive secrets whose exposure is worried to have damaging effects, and an obsessive public hermeneutics of small nonverbal gestures at the expense of speech.  Is a reformist or redemptive rethink of this communication infrastructure possible or are we stuck?  What are the morally distorting effects of omnipresent surveillance?  This talk might not answer that question, but it will tease it in many ways.    

About the Speaker

John Durham Peters is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He teaches and writes on media history and theory. He taught at the University of Iowa between 1986-2016. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), with the late Kenneth Cmiel. He is working on a media history of weather. 

About the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age

Housed in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age supports study and research into the possibilities for human flourishing in contemporary society.

The activities of the Forum combine philosophical reflection on human nature and the human good with practical reflection on the possibilities for living well, and for designing tools that contribute to human flourishing, in a world shaped by digital technology. Learn more: https://fhf.philosophy.illinois.edu/

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