The Sociality of the Platform: Re-imagining the Digital Public Sphere
Channel: Schulich Law
Date: 25/01/2018

This year's speaker is Annelise Riles, Jack G. Clarke Professor of Far East Legal Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell Law School. She will discuss "The Sociality of the Platform." How might we rethink the architecture and potentiality of the digital public sphere? Riles will describe one experiment in doing so—Meridian 180, “a multilingual platform for policy solutions+experimentation”—as an attempt to infuse a different sensibility into the digital public sphere. Riles argues from this experience that the “platform” as a genre of techno-sociality demands not only a critical anthropology of digital culture but a new ethics of friendship.