Charles Ess: The Embodied Self in a Digital Age

Professor Charles Ess is one of the foremost international scholars on ethics and the internet, and it is with great pleasure the Digital Culture Research Group welcomes him to Bergen to give a guest lecture on the ways in which our conceptions of the self are changing with our changing uses of technologies.

In the lecture "The Embodied Self in a Digital Age: Possibilities, Risks, and Prospects for a Pluralistic (Democratic/Liberal) Future?", Ess examines how communication as facilitated by electronic media interacts with our conceptions of our selves - our most basic and fundamental assumptions of who we are as human beings. He uses an interdisciplinary approach, conjoining communication theory, with particular reference to Innis, Eisenstein, McLuhan and Ong, as extended by Naomi Baron (2008), and philosophy, specifically political philosophy, phenomenology, and information ethics.

Charles Ess recently moved to Aarhus, where he is currently a Professor at The Department for Information and Media Studies. Charles Ess was a Distinguished Professor at Drury University in the US, and he is a leading and internationally recognized scholar within a variety of fields. He has made significant contributions within such fields as Internet research, with emphases on culturally-variable elements of Information and Communication Technology and Computer-Mediated Communication, ICTs and democratization, ICTs and religion, Internet research ethics, as well as Information and Computing Ethics, with an emphasis on cultural perspectives.

In addition, Charles Ess was a leading scholar in the creation of the biennial conference series CATaC, (Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication, 1998 and onwards), and from 2007 he has been president of the Association of Internet Researchers.

Professor Ess is also giving a talk at the Department of Information- and Media Studies on October 20th.