How Awesome (or Not) is Social Media?

media release: Room L150.

Join us for an evening of lively discussion with two thinkers who have parallel perspectives on the social media forces that seem to control our lives today.

The Civics Lab examines the factors that impede civil dialogue and the exchange of informed perspectives. At this special event, we explore the topic of social media, with an emphasis on Facebook and Meta. Scholar Christine Goding-Doty and cultural critic Virginia Heffernan will probe questions such as:

• Does social media impoverish dialogue? Is the problem with the technology itself or the kind of culture we’ve built around it?
• How might we be failing to understand how language and communication are evolving with social media?
• Is social media an imaginative and liberating space for people to explore different identities and thoughts? Or is it a “neurotoxin”?
• Do any wild, uncolonialized spaces remain on social media?

In this civil dialogue, we aim for wrinkles, complications, and nuance – it’s not a both-sides-debate that falls along “pickle ball” lines of right versus left or woke versus anti-woke. We’ll have ample time for audience questions following the discussion, which is free and open to all. Moderated by Ainehi Edoro, Vilas Early Career Professor and Constellations Mellon-Morgridge Professor at UW-Madison and founder and editor of Brittle Paper.

The Civics Lab is supported by a grant from the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue. Previous speakers in this series include Corey Robin and Musa al-Gharbi as well as a panel discussion, Humanities NOW: Dissent on Campus.