Fred Turner - Dreams of a Digital Utopia

How did the anti-establishment cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s end up so entangled with the high-tech digital revolution of the 80s and 90s? In this conversation, author Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture) and EnlightenNext's Carter Phipps avidly discuss the roots and reasons for this unique confluence and its significance for the future. Focusing on the unique character and influence of Steward Brand—original member of the Merry Pranksters, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, founder of the Global Business Network, to name only a few of his many accomplishments—Turner weaves a portrait of American culture (with Brand at the center of it all) that spans three generations. He touches on other seminal figures (John Cage, Paul Ehrlich, Buckminster Fuller) and the driving ideas behind them (cybernetics, systems theory, social networking) in his critique of a cultural movement still in motion.

BIO

Fred Turner is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Communication Department, with a focus on digital media, journalism, and the intersection of media and American cultural history. He is the acclaimed author of two books, From Counterculture to Cyberculture and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. His essays explore questions of media and cultural change, and tackle topics ranging from the rise of reality crime television to the countercultural roots of the idea of virtual community. His news stories, features, and reviews have appeared in the Pacific News Service, the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine.

Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Turner taught Communication at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Sloan School of Management. Turner earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego. He holds a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia University.