Thinking Globally: Computers, Networks, and the Construction of "Global" Spaces

Public Lecture | Paul N. Edwards | December 3, 2003

Time: 17.00hr Entry: Free Language: English Place: Collegezaal, Piet Zwart Institute, Overblaak 85, Rotterdam

Brief abstract: This talk explores how information infrastructures underlie, and help to produce, concepts, ideologies, and critiques of globalization and global space(s). the chief example will be climate change, a global political issue that would not exist without the global information infrastructure that produces data and knowledge about the planetary atmosphere. Also discussed will be the World Wide Web and other kinds of global infrastructures, as they exist in both ideology and practice.

Bio: Paul N. Edwards is Associate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan, where he specializes in the history, politics, and culture of information technologies. He is author of The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996) and co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001) and Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997). Edwards is presently completing a monograph tentatively titled The World in a Machine: Computer Models, Data Networks, and Global Atmospheric Politics. His work has received a number of awards, including a Guggenhiem Fellowship and a Carnegie Scholars Award. Edwards is spending the 2003-04 academic year in South Africa, where he is researching the technopolitics of information infrastructure before and after apartheid.

Background reading: A number of articles and book chapters by Paul N. Edwards can be downloaded at his website, http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/

This event is hosted by Media Design Research at the Piet Zwart Institute, the institute for postgraduate studies and research of the Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam. http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/. It is organised in collaboration with V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam. http://www.v2.nl/

Originally published at: http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/Seminars2/edwards