Programming

Upcoming Events

Crafting a More Democratic Digital Sphere (RSVP here)

Session I: Friday, February 21st, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Location: Franke Institute for the Humanities (Regenstein Library, Room S-102)

Description:

The betrayal of the internet’s democratic promise as a forum for communication is cause for dismay. Although on-line communication at its best allows virtual communities to form and to advance their interests, the obstacles to effective action are numerous. Corporate interests design and control on-line media to maximize profit through surveillance and big data, while reactionary groups mobilize online to cancel female voices, harass politicians, and disturb open communication. Social media algorithms designed to capture users’ attention and escalate emotion promote engagement in a perpetual feedback loop to the detriment of democratic association.

The threat to political agency and autonomy passes under the radar, since it is hard to recognize what we are losing through small choices about where and how to spend our leisure time. The smallest unit of democracy is individual agency. Instead of producing an informed democratic populace, exposure to endless social media feeds and even well-researched news sites, all saturated with eye-catching advertising, fragments our attention and numbs us into passivity. Liking, commenting, insulting or even supporting strangers, and reposting create volatile attachments. These nudge out participation in fraying institutions in favor of an engagement whose only tangible public effect is occasionally steering the ever-churning news cycle or organizing protests with little staying power.

With the erosion of citizens’ ability to act in the world as free agents, it is not only individuals who are affected. The online sphere has become the environment in which technologically advanced societies live. Although we may argue whether Habermas’s vision of a robust public sphere was ever realized in history, the current dominance of big tech companies redirects the flow of power away from institutions that organize political deliberation and participation. Realizing that big tech makes their products not for us, but to serve their own ends should be a wake-up call to throw off their domination.

The digital revolution is here to stay. The question is how to recreate the internet’s democratic potential. We propose to explore methods of intervening in these new, sometimes overlapping, sometimes siloed environments to shift agency back to users and create networks of communication that may serve democratic ends. The digital techniques of “tactical media”—such as hacking algorithmic feeds—can rectify imbalances in knowledge and power. Digital art and community-building, independent gaming, and strategic code-rewriting have created spaces for alternative expression. The challenge is to make digital audiences aware that they have the agency to make changes that will maintain freedom and individuality at scale.

Keywords: Agency, Algorithm, Attachment, Attention, Autonomy, Craft, Democracy, Domination, Emotion, Resistance

 

Session II: Saturday, February 22nd, 12:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Location: MADD Center (915 E 60th St)

Description:

In this workshop we’ll survey a collection of creative and experimental ways of using our web browsers to engage with online platforms in a manner that “undermines the exploitative algorithms + dark patterns designed by the data barons of surveillance capitalism.” Led by a group of international tactical media artists, participants will learn how they can use hidden features in their web browser to modify the UI/UX behind a number of big tech platforms. Along the way we’ll learn how big tech companies collect our data, which data they collect, and how they use that data and other methods to manipulate and exploit their users. We’ll learn techniques developed by internet artists and hacktivists for hacking and remixing these platforms in ways that that enable us to reclaim our agency in these online spaces. Bringing your own laptop is recommended.

 

 

Program schedule:

Friday, February 21: Conference

9:00 am: Coffee and pastries

9:30 am - 10:00 am: Introduction to series and conference: Michèle Lowrie, Nick Briz, and Jim Sparrow

10:00 am -12:00 pm: Moderator, Nick Feamster

- Anton Barba-Kay, “Can Democracy Be Digital (or Must It Be by the Book)?”

- Hoyt Long, “Watching Television in a Time of Political Polarization”

12:00 pm -1:00 pm: Catered lunch

1:00 pm -3:00 pm: Moderator, Chanhao Tan

- Emily Martinez, Tropical Subversions: Artistic Strategies for Reclaiming Digital Archives

- Sarah Grant, Radical Networks, Normalized

3:00 pm - 3:30 pm: Coffee break

3:30 pm - 4:30 pm: Moderator, Genevieve Lakier

- Joan Donovan, “Consumed by Content: Chaos and Carnage in the Zero Trust Society,”

4:30 pm -6 pm: Round table with Marc Downie, Patrick Jagoda, Molly Offer-Westort

Saturday, February 22: Student workshop/practicum:

12:00 pm - 1:00 pm: Catered lunch

1:00 pm - 3:00 pm: Nick Briz, Sarah Grant, and Emily Martinez

 

    Winter Quarter

    February 22, 2024, MADD Center, John Crerar Library, 12pm-3pm

    Crafting a More Digital Sphere: A Student Workshop and Practicum with Nick Briz, Sarah Grant, and Emily Martinez

    Join Nick Briz, Sarah Grant, and Emily Martinez in the Media Arts, Data, and Design Center at Crerar Library for lunch and a practical workshop on political activism in the age of digital communication.

     

    February 26, 2024, Regenstein Library 122, 4:30pm-6pm

    Is There a Mainstream Media? Election 2024 and the Triumph of Partisan News: A Conversation with James Bennet

    Bennet, former editor of the New York Times’ Opinion section and current Senior Editor at The Economist, looks back on the news media’s work in Election 2024 and considers what lies ahead for American political journalism.

     

    February 27, 2024, Quadrangle Club, 9am-11am

    The Future of Mainstream Political Journalism: A conversation with James Bennet

    The Editors of The Harper Review and the Parrhesia Program for Public Thinking and Discourse will co-host a breakfast for undergraduate writers at the Quadrangle Club with James Bennet.

    Fall Quarter  

    October 18, 2024

    Reporting the News in Chaotic Times - The 2024 Election, Journalism, and the Future of Democracy: An Evening with Margaret Sullivan                 

    The Editors of the Chicago Maroon joined the Parrhesia Program to co-host a dinner for undergraduate journalists at the Quadrangle Club with Margaret Sullivan, the former public editor of the New York Times and an award-winning columnist and author. From the campus protests to the chaotic events of the Harris-Trump presidential race, news organizations struggled to define the stakes and tell the stories of the 2024 election year. In a wide-ranging conversation, Sullivan took students behind the scenes of two papers of record, the New York Times and the Washington Post, answering questions and sharing her experiences reporting the news in a crowded and rapidly evolving media environment.

    Sullivan served as public editor of the New York Times from 2012 to 2016, and as media columnist for the Washington Post during the 2016 and 2020 elections and their aftermaths, including the violent turmoil of January. 6, 2021. She is executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School, a columnist for The Guardian US, and the author of two books, Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy (2020) and Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life (2022). She was the first woman editor of her hometown daily paper, The Buffalo News, where she started her career as a summer intern.

     

    October 19, 2024

    Election 2024: Is the News Media Up for the Job? A Conversation with Margaret Sullivan

    The Parrhesia Program for Public Thinking and Discourse hosted a public conversation with Margaret Sullivan at the Logan Center to examine how the news media was covering the volatile course of Election 2024. She evaluated how traditional news outlets were serving voters’ needs in a media environment crowded with distractions and misinformation, and whether American journalism could meet the unprecedented challenges of a historic election.

     

    November 14, 2024

    The Promise and the Perils of Political Narrative: A Discussion with Nicholas Lemann

    The Parrhesia Program partnered with the Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Chicago Center on Democracy to host Nicholas Lemann (Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism; Director, Columbia Global Reports; Dean Emeritus, Columbia Journalism School) to discuss how people take in political information and how they make political judgments, and the crucial role journalism plays in that process. Journalism as a field has a deep commitment to narrative as a means of engaging people’s interest in public affairs. But narrative can be perilous, even misleading, despite being factually accurate. We say we want voters and officials to make their judgments on the basis of facts. Is this realistic? Is it consistent with presenting political information in narrative form? Lemann discussed this question from two perspectives: the supply side (what information, and which stories, about politics are available to us) and the demand side (how people take in and process information and stories). How easy or hard is it for us to get to the truth of complicated situations quickly, both as truth-consumers and truth-providers, and is storytelling a help or a hindrance? This event was part of the Franke Institute’s Voices of Democracy Series.

     

    November 15, 2024

    Writing Political Nonfiction in the New Media Landscape: A Lunch with Nicholas Lemann

    Undergraduate journalists joined Nicholas Lemann for an intimate conversation about how the practice and profession of political journalism has evolved over the past four decades. Lemann drew from his experiences as a staff writer for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and as a former Dean of Columbia Journalism School, to discuss the challenges of practicing political journalism in the current media landscape and to consider what the future holds for the next generation of political reporters.

     

    January 15, 2025

    Alice Dreger, “Whistleblowing into the Wind”

    As part of Parrhesia’s Science Communication Public Lecture Series, Alice Dreger, the historian and author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Pursuit of Justice, spoke at Breasted Hall on her experiences investigating ethical problems in the treatment of intersex patients.