We are delighted to invite you to the fourth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester!
Elisabetta Ferrari
(Aarhus University)
Technological Imaginaries and the Universal Ambitions of Silicon Valley
Thursday, December 12, 2024
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
How we think and talk about digital technology matters. If we want to truly understand the place of technology in our societies, we need to go beyond the devices and the algorithms and consider technologies as sets of discourses. These discourses about technology are political: not because they are necessarily aligned with a political party instead of another, but because they envision specific kinds of social and political arrangements.
Drawing on her new book, Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist imaginaries and the politics of digital technologies (University of California Press), in this talk Ferrari shows how these discourses, which she calls “technological imaginaries”, shape how we experience digital technologies. She discusses how, for the past 30 years, Silicon Valley tech actors have produced and popularized a specific way of thinking about digital technologies, which has become mainstream. This dominant technological imaginary brings together technocratic aspirations and populist justifications. While arising out of the peculiarities of Silicon Valley and of the American 1990s, this dominant imaginary has posited its universality by presenting its tenets as if they were global, unbiased, and equally suitable for everyone, everywhere. She argues that to really curb the socio-political influence of Big Tech companies we also need to understand, critique, and resist the power of their technological imaginary.
Who?
Elisabetta Ferrari is an AIAS-AUFF Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University (Denmark). Her work focuses on digital technologies, activism, and social justice. Before joining AIAS, she was a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow, UK. She previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania (US).
