Political scientist Kevin Munger lectures on Vilém Flusser's 1978 Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations? 

Initially rejected by MIT Press for being too radical, Flusser’s 1978 Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations? was finally published in December 2022 by Stanford University Press. The work maps out a massive transition in the way we communicate—one that was legible to Flusser in the 1970s, has only accelerated with the proliferation of networked media, and might possibly help us understand—so Munger argues—why everything now feels so weird.

WATCH VIDEO -> HERE <- youtube.com/newmodelsTV 

Earlier this year, Kevin Munger, a political scientist and repeat New Models guest, led a reading group via the New Models Discord server on Communicology. Synthesizing the group's findings with his own analysis, Munger put together this talk unpacking Flusser's work in terms of the present—or as Munger puts it, in a way that set out to answer, Why are things so weird? As in, why does communication now feel so weird, so dissociated and unhinged?

With this post, we're sharing the audio from Munger's talk to the NM RSS. But the best way to ingest it is to WATCH THE VIDEO.

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CREDITS
LECTURE & SLIDES: Kevin MungerVIDEO & EDITING: LIL INTERNET
THANK YOUThe New Models Communicology Reading GroupJoshua Citarella & Do Not ResearchTrauma Bar und Kino, Berlin
A version of this lecture was first presented 28 July 2023 at Trauma Bar und Kino, Berlin
Kevin Munger is the Asst. Prof. of Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State, currently on leave at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. He is also the author of The YouTube Apparatus (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press) and Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture (2022, Columbia University Press), and writes the political-and-media theory blog Never Met a Science at https://kevinmunger.substack.com