I Was Never Here: Stories about Media and Belonging

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Friday, February 15th, 2019
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

If you Googled yourself, what would you find? How did it get there and what does it say about you? More and more, media are everywhere, and we leave traces of ourselves as we use the various media that intersect with our lives. Such issues are the subject of our second Colloquium presentation of the term: "I Was Never Here: Stories about Media and Belonging," by Dr. Ravindra Mohabeer (Media Studies, VIU).

The talk shares stories of different types of media use and their relationship to a sense of belonging and identity. According to Dr. Mohabeer, media often seem to create a sense of placelessness: "we are physically present but carried away through our imaginations and asked to believe that we are somewhere else or someone else entirely. However, even when that belief tends to linger, it is not always restricted to acts of fantasy. With the use of things like ‘social media,’ we are constantly encouraged to groom how others experience us through media, and we are regularly asked to create a type of presence that is at once ‘real’ and imagined.” As we make more of our ‘connections’ in digital and other mediated ways, the importance of thinking critically about these shifting forms of presence and linking them back to our media use grows in significance. In particular, says Dr. Mohabeer, we need to “think about mediated experiences and a sense of belonging as having a real and tangible outcome that must be understood and negotiated.”

Dr. Mohabeer (M.A., SFU; Ph.D., York) has been a professor at VIU since 2009. He has taught courses on digital media and communication; game theory; television; and propaganda, persuasion and promotion. His intellectual interest is in how people use media in everyday life and how this becomes a major basis of culture. He has published a number of refereed articles and made many conference presentations based on his research.

Come early for coffee, cookies, and conversation in the theatre foyer!

https://ah.viu.ca/colloquium-series