On the 1st November, we welcomed Dr Vince Miller from my department at the University of Kent for the first in a series of public lectures blending themes from the arts and sociology.
The audience was an interesting mix including TMS students and residents, members of the public and Kent students – and the Q&A the talk inspired reflected the varied ways that each engaged with the ideas Vince introduced.
The talk covered a lot of ground with the main themes being:
- thinking through the amounts of effort that went into creating online worlds, only for them to be abandoned
- what it means to walk your avatar through an abandoned virtual world
- the nature of digital capitalism – the work we put in, the money we spend and produce, overproduction
- that these might be examples of failed utopias
- the internet as a space of waste rather than productivity
The article that this talk was based on is available here.