released 8/26/2025

Media theorist John Durham Peters wants us to reexamine the purposes of media and how fundamental media are. Every civilization must develop ways of mediating between oneself, between other people, and between people and nature. Media are not simply new information technologies and fine gadgetry, but significant responses to the perennial human questions of how we manage time, space, water, power, and emotions. The difference between a healthy city or a thriving civilization and a poor one is how we use media to order and reveal the world around us. Peters is the author of The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Media (University of Chicago, 2015).

59 minutes

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