[Air-L] 2014 Steve Jones Internet Lecture: Ian Bogost

[Sarina Chen]

The 2014 Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture features Ian Bogost, at 1:30
pm on Sunday, May 25 in Seattle Sheraton, Redwood A, during the
International Communication Association’s 64th Annual Conference, Seattle,
May 22 - 26.



Ian Bogost is a video game designer, critic and researcher. He holds a
joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication
and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia
Institute of Technology, where he is the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.  He is a founding partner at
Persuasive Games. His research and writing consider video games as an
expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social
and political issues, including airport security, consumer debt,
disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu
and tort reform.



In his lecture, Bogost states that thoughts are things.  A word that we'd
first associate with matter so quickly becomes one of matters, of affairs,
incidents, penchants, circumstances, activities, notions.  Bogost
discusses, how we can learn to live with things, where things mean stuff
rather than ideas and events? How do we approach a world so replete, so
overburdened with stuff that it's literally falling apart from the wear?
How do we think of ourselves as really just another thing among others,
rather than their masters and mistresses? How can we respect things for
what they are, irrespective of our contact or concern, and how do we really
do so, not just late one weird night, but every day, habitually, for real?
And how do we do so without descending into the anguish of nihilism,
without simply concluding that the universe is fundamentally indifferent?



This event is co-sponsored by the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet
Research (www.cccsir.com), University of Illinois, Chicago, and the
International Communication Association.  For more information about this
event, please contact Shing-Ling Sarina Chen, sarina.chen at uni.edu.