“Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age — A Virtual Talk.” History Department, U. California, Santa Barbara (4 May 2020, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time) (Zoom meeting information sent after request through this form.)

  • Abstract: Can today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all? In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history. Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive ‘network archaeologies’ can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other.
  • Video Video recording of this talk (47 min.)