[Air-L] Tomorrow: Selfie Democracy Book Event @ Centre for Data, Culture, and Society

[Kate Miltner]

Hi all,

The Digital Social Science Cluster at the Centre for Data, Culture,
and Society at the University of Edinburgh is hosting an online event
tomorow with Elizabeth Losh, author of the forthcoming book Selfie
Democracy.

Kate

________________________________

Elizabeth Losh - Selfie Democracy: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and the
New Digital Politics

Wed, 4 May 2022, 16:00 – 17:30 BST

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/selfie-democracy-barack-obama-donald-trump-and-the-new-digital-politics-tickets-314455192947

Based on interviews with White House insiders, archival research, and
a trove of digital data, this presentation provides a preview of the
author’s forthcoming book about digital literacy in the White House.
It reveals important insights about the smartphone practices of the
most significant actors in recent American politics—Barack Obama and
Donald Trump as presidents and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden as
presidential candidates—and how their approaches to domestic
governance and crisis management related to their everyday
technological choices as users of computational media. Such powerful
political leaders often reinforce certain cultural assumptions about
the power of the smartphone that perpetuate myths about connection,
transparency, participation, and access. These myths are further
amplified in rhetoric borrowed from Silicon Valley about how these
technologies supposedly strengthen social bonds, enable exploration,
encourage engagement, and overcome barriers. Obama might have been the
anti-Trump and Trump the anti-Obama, but they both used mobile
computing in ways that redefined the office of president. This talk
exposes the unintended consequences of wireless technologies on
political leadership and shows how seemingly benign mobile devices
that hold out the promise of direct democracy can ultimately undermine
representative forms of government, as the January 6th, 2021 storming
of the US Capital by a selfie-taking mob livestreaming the
insurrection demonstrates.