In this talk, Laurence Scott expands on his essay for the Borrowed Time publication, which considers the digital age’s double-faced relationship to time. We inhabit a networked environment that is both defined by innovation and nostalgia. The future is always arriving with the latest, fastest devices, and the ceaseless unfolding of a Twitter timeline creates a mood of eternal ‘nextness’, the present moment time-stamped and eclipsed almost as soon as it arrives. And yet, social media encourages us to produce an archive of our own personal histories. Our pasts have never been more present. Here Scott will ask: how does this double-faced view impact the politics and ethics of our times?

Laurence Scott is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing. He is the author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (William Heinemann, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2015. In 2011 he was named a ‘New Generation Thinker’ by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC, and has since written and presented programmes for Radio 3’s The Essay and The Sunday Feature. His essays and criticism have appeared in the Guardian, the Financial Times and the London Review of Books, among other publications. In 2014 he won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction.

This event is free to attend but booking is required via Eventbrite.

For more information about Jerwood/FVU Awards 2016: Borrowed Time please visit the exhibition page.