Salons, Twitter, seminars, and guests
My fall 2022 seminar guest lineup is strong, promising good conversation, as a seminar or a salon should.
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Why my seminar is also a “salon”
I spent a fair amount of time digging around to find views and information of the “salon,” also known as “table societies” (Germany, mainly) and coffeehouses with coffee for a penny, thereby the other name “penny university” (England). The history of the salon is indeed interesting and important, leading as it did to the development of the “public sphere” (Habermas, following Kant). The history of the salon is, perhaps surprisingly, much argued about, though Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is a focal point. Scholars refute, refer to, or elaborate upon that work.
I won’t go into it, since it doesn’t matter for my purposes here.
I’ve referred to the choosing of class guests for my seminar on “our complex relationships with technology” as a search for people I’d like to chat with. It’s an exciting prospect, actually, since it gives me reason to reach out to people I have come to know over the years and people whose work I’ve come across in my reading. In a way, that is completely in the spirit of the eighteenth-century salon, which was built around conversation and sought to foster rational discussion in a group. The salon was in a sense a public version of the court. The salon was composed of literate people, some from the elite and the artistic or literary crowd, but many from the bourgeosie — the emerging middle class. The group in my seminar is literate, not necessarily literary or artistic, smart, and for the most part middle class.
Our class guests are the philosophes who qualify by being practitioners of an area we study or are themselves studying a topic that intersects with the focus of the class. The idea is simple: we want to have an informed conversation with someone who is an authority or who has an interesting viewpoint.
As it happens seminar guests represent a broad spectrum of viewpoints. I recall telling a guest, “I'm sure there would be active (even heated) discussion if we all got together for dinner.” He responded that he’d like to have that kind of dinner. Students have noticed and appreciated the diversity of backgrounds, and I think it’s been an important part of developing serious critical perspectives and skills — a goal, or perhaps an outcome, of the salons of the eighteenth century and our twenty-first century seminar.
Discussion is different from debate
If salon-like conversation is an important ingredient to a seminar, the spirit that it brings may also feel imperfect, unfinished, unclear, even ambiguous. In many matters — and especially in matters of our complex relationship with technology — that spirit is a feature, not a bug. Discussion opens up and explores experience and knowledge.
I think we’ve gotten rusty when it comes to language and public exchange. Twitter, Facebook, and the rest provide “platforms” but they also inherently shape discourse, even though they don’t seem to want to own up to it. (And it’s true: all media shape discourse, even the salon or the seminar.)
For Twitter or for Facebook, success doesn’t entirely hinge on being judicious in matters of content or content moderation, as important and necessary as that is for the well-being of a platform. The framework and nature of the medium shape the discourse just as powerfully. Online social media severely limit the quality, the depth, and the capacity of nuance in public exchanges. That’s not the fault of business decisions; it is a consequence of the scale and the operational frameworks of online tools. Twitter, for all its astonishing breadth and activity is not a modern “public square” as Elon Musk claims, or if it is, the noisy social media giant serves as a tittering example of the impoverishment of public discussion. True exchange of ideas is not measured by quantity, shrillness, variety or “engagement.” It also often requires more than a couple hundred characters.
The fall 2022 class guests
So, the class guests come in with views and questions to engage in conversation. From that, we hone our skills of rational discussion. Important in a seminar, as it was in a salon, is civility. Face-to-face, we can foster a culture of caring.
Five individuals will engage the class in conversation this fall. They are excellent and remarkably diverse in their work and their backgrounds. The general themes of this fall’s class include technology and control and the relationships of technology and empathy, art/creativity, surveillance, and “intelligence.” Readings include both fiction and non-fiction, from law review articles, challenging philosophical essays, history, and the popular press.
The guests’ brief bios appear below, alphabetically by last name. I think you’ll agree that it’s a great group.
Brinnae Bent is a data scientist who uses digital approaches to improve heal th care. She completed her doctoral studies in the Big Ideas Lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University where she worked to develop digital biomarkers of glycemic health from noninvasive wearables. She has led projects establishing best practices for wearable sensor validation, investigating wearable sensor device inaccuracy, optimizing sampling rate and data compression of wearable sensors, and using wearable sensors for human activity recognition. Prior to graduate studies, she worked with the NSF ASSIST Center to develop the next generation of wearable sensors for sleep disorders and asthma. She is also an avid ultramarathoner and has completed various 50K, 100K, and 24-hour races She completed her PhD at Duke in 2021 and is currently lead developer of the Digital Biomarker Discovery Pipeline (DBDP) and Digital Health Data Scientist at Edge Analytics.
Paul Jaskot is Professor of Art History, Chair of Duke’s Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies (AAHVS), and Co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. As a leader in digital art history, he has been part of the Holocaust Geography Collaborative, an international team of scholars that has been exploring the use of GIS and other digital methods to analyze central problems in the spatial history of the Holocaust, including issues rising from the built environment. He specializes in the history of modern German architecture and art, with a particular interest in the political history of architecture before, during, and after the Nazi era. He has also published on Holocaust Studies topics more broadly, modern architecture including the history of Chicago architecture, and methodological essays on Marxist art history.
Anu Kirk is Vice President of Product at Osso (https://ossovr.com/). His career has consistently engaged art, music, and technology, exploring the ways that artistic expression of all kinds can be deepened or limited by technology tools. He has pursued his interests in large multi-national corporations and in start-ups. At Sony Network Entertainment, he was Director of Music Services, where he led Playstation Music (formerly Music Unlimited); at PlayStation, he was Director and GM of Virtual Reality Products. Work with MOG led to award-winning Android and Apple apps that were acquired by Beats Music and later formed the core of Apple Music. He and his teams won a Webby Award (2013) and “Best VR Headset” award for PlayStation VR (2017). He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in economics. He is an active musician and writer and was awarded a patent (“Interactive delivery of media using dynamic playlist generation subject to restrictive criteria”) with a co-inventor who is a good friend and colleague. You can thank them in part for your streaming music queue.
Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips is Director of Communications at the North Carolina Institute of Medicine and a writer living in Raleigh. She produces and hosts the Future of Feeling podcast. Her recent book, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World, explores the interplay and the profound challenges that modern technology poses to empathy, a fundamental human attribute necessary for human society. The book is about “how our brains work, how they’re subtly being rewired to work differently, and what that ultimately means for us as humans.” Her work has been featured in many print and online publications, including Lithub, Scientific American, New York Post, VICE, Salon, the Columbia Journalism Review, NC Medical Journal, Institutional Investor, among others. She took her undergraduate degree in journalism and international studies from Elon University, a master's from Columbia University, and she studied film at the University of Sussex.
Augustus Wendell is an educator, technologist and designer who serves on th e faculty at Duke. He earned his MFA in Computer Art from The School of Visual Arts and an undergraduate degree from Northeastern University. He researches the intersection of the built environment and digital inquiry and has published on digital humanities and heritage, digital design research and design education. Before coming to Duke, he taught at the New Jersey Institute of Technology where he directed the Digital Design degree and was the director of the Motion Analysis Lab and the Virtual Reality Lab. He has also held appointments at Parsons the New School for Design, The New York School of Interior Design and Virginia Tech. As owner and creative director at kim.wendell design llc, Augustus has directed visual imagery campaigns for numerous national and international clients.
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Tags: seminar, salon, discussion, debate
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Maybe a little wooden, but this “spark note” provides a nice overview of Habermas’ thinking on his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. It was probably a committee writing project, but it works: SparkNotes. “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: General Summary.” Accessed May 10, 2022. https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/public/summary/.
The tome. Beware of thickly layered prose. The German book appeared in 1962, and the English translation was published in 1989: Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.
The Wikipedia article on the salon is actually pretty nice as a quick introduction: “Salon (Gathering).” In Wikipedia, April 25, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salon_(gathering)&oldid=1084593099.
A rather trenchant take on the Muskian moment: Seymour, Richard. “Musk Takes Twitter” N+1 (blog), April 29, 2022. https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/musk-takes-twitter/. “We users are not citizens of a representative democracy, but lab rats governed by incentives and controls: Musk is simply the first such rodent to take over the laboratory.”