Presented by Lee Humphreys, associate professor of communication at Cornell University. 

Many of the ways we use mobile and social media today have longstanding precedents in historical media like diaries, photo albums, and scrapbooks. What we think of as the “social media revolution” is part of a much longer story about the use of media for connecting people through the documenting and sharing of everyday life. In this talk, Lee Humphreys will present some of the themes and questions raised by her recent book, The Qualified Self, which places mobile and social media into a longer historical context to reveal what is really new about these contemporary communication technologies, how a “qualified self” precedes a quantified self, and what fundamental aspects of the human experience emerge through a variety of technological platforms.

Sponsored by the Institute of Communications Research.