Department seminar: Rolf Scott
The Department of Social Anthropology is happy to announce the upcoming seminar with Researcher Rolf Scott, University of Bergen. The title of the lecture is "The Technologies of the Global Self".
Main content
Seminar paper
Global technologies are based on how the individual relates to the global via the global coordinating structure of latitude and longitude (global grid). This technology has changed how we perceive the human and the social. Technologies of the global grid, including the internet and its derivates like social media, have created enormous shifts of wealth and enabled global corporations and states to challenge individual sovereignty, democracy, and the present world order.
Such a development necessitates opening our understanding of technology, to grasp its use and question its dominance. This presentation will do so in three parts. Firstly, by arguing that technology must be seen as the most basic human quality from which the individual grasps existence, which means culture, language, and cosmology are aspects of humankind's technological orientation. The second part will discuss how technology must be seen as an aspect of the collective, while the spaces many global technologies occupy must be seen as part of the commons. Corporations should not be able to privatise certain aspects of human existence. The final part will present how the Western world, based on the egalitarian notion of the individualistic individual, constituted the self as a point global entity from the medieval until the present. In effect, creating what we of today understand as a particularised individual existing in a particularised global world.
About the lecturer
Rolf Scott is Researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. Read more about Rolf Scott here.