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committee press room proposal for the institute timeline of global citizenship
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Previous Roundtables 2004- America and Global Power: Empire or . . . ? 2003- Complex Contradictions: African, American, and Middle Eastern Perspectives. 2002- Prometheus' Bequest: Technology and Change 2001- Body, Mind, and Global Health
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The
theme of the 2002 Macalester International Roundtable is From the beginning, human struggle for survival necessitated an understanding of the material world. Usually, once a particular problem or mystery comes to the fore and is comprehended, invention/innovation and utility follow. The first underscores conception and investigation-the essence of science; the latter points to the transmutation of the effort into a practical apparatus or technology. Similar to the humans who beget them, technology and its handmaiden, science, carry the marks of their time as well as help define the movement of history. Since the Industrial Revolution, technology as a coherence of hardware and software has assumed center stage in the transformation of the environment, livelihoods, social organization, politics, and culture. But it is in this epoch of globalization where its impact and the resultant disequilibria seem most phenomenal. From a reversal of the roles played by art/aesthetics and technology, in which the latter now seem to lead the former, a retooling of the economy around computing and digitizing, with enormous consequences for the calculus of benefits and liabilities, a speeded up hybridization (some would say monochromatizing) of culture, to the thickness of overall networking, technology's mediative presence is fundamentally altering our conception of time, space, and even identity-three taken-for-granted dimensions of human existence. In the end, for some, we are at the dawn of new freedoms and unprecedented individuation. For others, we may have entered a final enclosure. |
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