May 1, 2025: Free online UK seminar on desirable digital society
This is a screenshot of the event’s digital poster circulated by the ESRC Digital Good Network.
Two University of Sheffield academics—Drs. Helen Kennedy and Ros Williams—will speak in a virtual event to explore the features that humans might want to see in a future digital society.
Titled ‘Reflections on the challenges of asking normative questions about the digital society we want’, this one-hour event will start at 11 AM (UK time) on May 1, 2025, Thursday.
One could sign up for the event at no cost via this link:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/digital-good-in-progress-helen-kennedy-and-ros-williams-tickets-1301883421359?aff=oddtdtcreator
The event is organized by the Sheffield-based ESRC Digital Good Network. The abbreviation ESRC stands for Economic and Social Research Council, which is part of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)—a public body funded by the UK government but answerable to the parliament rather than a minister.
The event will be taking place within around three days of the UK-based Amnesty International’s release of its annual report ‘The State of the World’s Human Rights’ (April 2025), whose ‘Preface’ notes an appalling fact known to all digital-society natives of today: that ‘the world has been made audience to a live-streamed genocide’ in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israeli citizens.
The ‘[c]hallenges of asking normative questions about the digital society we want’ can, thus, barely be overestimated.
— Dr. Piyush Mathur, Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Lextington Books, 2017)