The Social Media Addiction Machine - Dr Richard Seymour, PhD
Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment, and share. Some people might even go as far as using a service like Growthoid in order to get followers. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.
This talk will provide an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. You’ll learn about the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media, what’s really behind our addiction, and how to set yourself free.
Reading Recommendations:
- The Twittering Machine – Richard Seymour
- The Freudian Robot– Lydia Liu
- The Internet Unconscious– Sandy Baldwin
- The Globalisation of Addiction– Bruce Alexander
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism– Shoshana Zuboff
- The Machine Always Wins: What drives our addiction to social media
About the Speaker:
Richard Seymour
Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster and the author of numerous books about politics, including The Liberal Defence of Murder (Verso, 2008), Against Austerity (2014), Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2016) and The Twittering Machine (The Indigo Press, 2019). He completed his PhD in sociology at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Paul Gilroy.
In 2005, Seymour’s blog: ‘Lenin’s Tomb’ was named as the 21st most popular blog in the UK, and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Jacobin, the London Review of Books, the New York Times and Prospect.
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Next Event:
- University of Greenwich, London
- 18/12/2022
