On "Technologies of the Intellect" / Stephen C. Levinson

Abstract

This lecture was written in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, and thus with the likelihood it would never actually be delivered! This virus is just one of the pestilences that has swept over Eurasia from the east in the last two millennia, retracing the networks that have linked the continents over the vast temporal and geographic scales that interested Jack Goody. Thanks to the internet, the lecture originally scheduled for May was delivered on 6th October 2020. I was pleased to expunge at least partially the debt to one of my intellectual ancestors. Goody himself would surely have been fascinated by the effects of a new medium of communication, in the age of Zoom.