So You Want to Change the World? A Hitchhiker's Guide to Subversive Thinking

The sixth installment in our 2023 lecture series will feature IGS President Lance Strate. Please join us on Monday, October 16th at 6:00 PM EDT for 

So You Want to Change the World?

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Subversive Thinking

This talk speaks to the often expressed desire to get more out of life than a paycheck, the desire to have a positive impact on the world and make things better. While it is entirely possible to act without thinking in ways that lead to significant shifts and disruptions, such outcomes are often tragic, because the consequences of change can be unpredictable, and every benefit unavoidably has its cost. Approaching change with humility and a sense of the comedic requires a degree of consciousness and mindfulness, and in this regard general semantics and media ecology can help to provide some suggestions for the kind of subversive thinking that we are in need of. 

Lance Strate is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City, the President of the Institute of General Semantics, and the the author of 10 books, including On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology (2011), Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited (2014), Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition (2017), Diatribal Writes of Passage in a World of Wintertextuality (2020), Concerning Communication: Epic Quests and Lyric Excursions in the Human Life World (2022), and First Letter of My Alphabet (2023). He is co-editor of several anthologies, including Korzybski and... (2012), and Taking Up McLuhan's Cause: Perspectives on Media and Formal Causality (2017). He delivered the 2018 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, received the Media Ecology Association's 2018 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book and their 2013 Walter J. Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship, the Eastern Communication Association's 2019 Distinguished Research Fellow Award, the New York State Communication Association's 2019 Neil Postman Mentor Award and their 1998 John F. Wilson Fellow Award for exceptional scholarship, leadership, and dedication to the field of communication, the Global Listening Centre’s 2020 Outstanding Research Award, and the 2022 J. Talbot Winchell Award for Service from the Institute of General Semantics.

The lecture will be held via Zoom. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Registrants will receive the Zoom link in advance of the lecture.