Philosophy Speaker Series

The Department of Philosophy and the Department of Communication Studies Proudly Present a Public Lecture by:

Dr. Mark Kingwell, Trinity College, University of Toronto

• Date: Friday, March 13, 2020
• Time: 4:00 p.m. 
• Location: Wilfrid Laurier University, Arts building, 1E1

Refreshments will be served.

 Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface

Don’t miss this special opportunity to see Dr. Mark Kingwell discuss his recent and topical book, Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface. In this work Dr. Kingwell draws on philosophical analyses of boredom and happiness to examine the pressing issues of screen addiction and the lure of online outrage. Kingwell takes seriously the possibility that current conditions of life and connection are creating hollowed-out human selves, divorced from their own external world. While scrolling, swiping, and clicking suggest purposeful action, such as choosing and connecting with others, Kingwell argues that repeated flicks of the finger provide merely the shadow of meaning, by reducing us to scattered data fragments, Twitter feeds, Instagram posts, shopping preferences, and text trends captured by algorithms (excerpted from McGill-Queen’s University Press).

 Dr. Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He has held visiting posts at Cambridge University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the City University of New York, where he was a Weissman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Humanities. He has been, since 2001, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine in New York.