The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture Vince Miller (Univ of Kent) Wed, Dec 10 14:00 UNiv of Westminster Harrow Campus Room A7.01 http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars/the-crisis-of-presence-... Registration: e-mail to [email protected] In this presentation, Vince Miller problematises the notion of presence within a contemporary culture in which social life is increasingly lived and experienced through networked digital communication technologies alongside the physical presence of co-present bodies. Using the work of Heidegger, Levinas, Bauman, Rotman (and others), he suggests that the increasing use of these technologies and our increasing presence in online environments challenges our tendencies to ground moral and ethical behaviours in face-to-face or materially co-present contexts. Instead, the mediated presences we can achieve amplify our cultural tendency to objectify the social world and weaken our sense of moral and ethical responsibility to others. Such a disjuncture manifests itself in a number of popular contemporary concerns over privacy, ‘anti-social’ behaviour, and the problems of free speech and inappropriate disclosure. Vince Miller will suggest that the solution of overcoming such problems lies not in increasing regulation, but in more scrutiny paid to the software architecture of social media as the medium by which humans are ‘made present’ online, as well as an expansion of the notion of being/presence to include virtual data/presences, so that these may gain ‘ethical weight’. Vincent Miller is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Cultural Studies at the University of Kent, where he has research interests in digital culture and urban sociology. He is author of ‘Understanding Digital Culture’ (Sage) and is currently writing ‘The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture: Ethics, Privacy and Disclosure in Mediated Social Life’, also for Sage.