Mack Lecture: Mark Kingwell: Boredom and the Interface

Are you bored of the endless scroll of your social media feed? Do you skim articles on your screen in search of intellectual stimulation that never arrives? Philosopher and critic Mark Kingwell examines the pressing issues of screen addiction and the lure of online outrage—raising the possibility that current conditions of life and connection are creating hollowed-out human selves, divorced from their own external world.

Kingwell is renowned for engaging subjects as varied as liberal-democratic theory, moral philosophy, communication studies, aesthetics, and cultural studies in accessible ways that resonate and enlighten. He is currently professor of philosophy and fellow of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He has previous held visiting posts at Cambridge University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Chicago, and City University of New York. Between 2001 and 2004, he was chair of the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. To date he is the author or coauthor of dozens of articles and eighteen books of political, cultural, and aesthetic theory including A Civil Tongue (1995), the national bestsellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), Concrete Reveries (2008), and Glenn Gould (2009). In 2018, Kingwell was named a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in both Canada and the United Kingdom.