Dr. Lance Strate, Harron Family Chair in Communication Public Lecture: 11/3

Dr. Lance Strate presents a lecture entitled: Fatal Amusements: Contemplating the Tempest of Contemporary Media and American Culture What will be the fate of American culture in the 21st century? What are the prospects for survival in the face on an ongoing onslaught of technological innovation that has mutated our forms of public communication and discourse? Are we, as Neil Postman warned, amusing ourselves to death, enacting the nightmare vision from Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel, Brave New World? Media ecology, the study of media as environments, offers an approach for making sense out of our current technological maelstrom, and engaging in critical evaluation of our contemporary situation. Drawing on media ecology scholarship, this talk will raise questions about the future of our culture, and the prospects for retaining our humanity in a technological age.