COMPAS Conference

How many times have we heard someone in the tech industry proclaim that their new product is “revolutionary” or “disruptive”? Radical upheaval in the ways we live and communicate is now so frequent that it doesn’t even strike us as unusual. Yet the original iPhone came out only a decade ago, in the same year that Netflix started streaming. Facebook and YouTube came into existence just a few years before that. On the timeline of human history, this all happened mere moments ago, and as technology becomes more and more rapidly integrated into our everyday lives, we would do well to take a step back and contemplate exactly what is happening.

Part of Ohio State’s yearlong Conversations on Morality, Politics, and Society (COMPAS) program, this all-day conference will investigate the many ways in which our lives have been changed by our technological creations. The public is invited to the February 15 session to hear speakers that include Antero Garcia (Stanford University), Ethan Kross (University of Michigan), Amanda Lenhart (Better Life Lab at New America), and Jessica Vitak (University of Maryland).