Sociologist Felicia Song from Westmont College joins the show to discuss her new book Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age.

TRANSCRIPT

0:01

Hey everyone. Welcome to Jessup Think. I'm your host Mark Moore

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and your co-host Rex Gurney.

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We're excited to have Professor Felicia Song on the show. She's a cultural sociologist who studies the place of digital technologies in contemporary life at Westmont College.

0:17

And I noticed by looking at my phone, that we actually had the podcast this morning, so I'm here. And otherwise I wouldn't be,

0:23

hey, yeah, technology did play a good role in our lives today. And it got us here. Her new book is restless devices, recovering personhood, presents in place in the digital age. It's such an important look at the role of technology in our lives, and how we can be more intentional, and how technology can have a proper place in our lives. So enjoy the show, I hope you're kind of challenged to look at how technology how you use technology, and how you can maybe better use it moving forward.

1:04

We are really so excited that you joined us for the show. It's such an invitation welcome. And it's such an important important topic, especially as we're in kind of the holiday season. And there's maybe a lot new get new gadgetry that is in our houses. And, and and I think you know, as we kind of start, I wanted to start with full full disclosure, that we are recording this in a room full of electronic devices, and obviously recording a podcast that utilizing. But I think it's so important for us to, especially in the digital age, to understand the role in the place of technology in our lives, because it's just kind of here. And we often maybe approach it without thinking about that, without thinking about its role and how it's just now become a normal part of our lives. And, and all of us on the show kind of have gone through the transition from less technology to more technology, we can we can all remember a time when we didn't have a phone in our pockets that had GPS on it. But we had we had Mapquest printed out in our cars.

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Or you have to give people directions and write write it down and have them get lost.

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Yeah, and I appreciated your intro, Felicia, just kind of talking about your own family and your own. You know, you called yourself a late adopter. How was your kind of you and your family's relationship to technology been?

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Yeah, um, so I, I'm just not the kind of person that keeps up with the latest update the latest phone or the latest anything. That's kind of just a personality feature, I guess.

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And and so the rest of my family is though I'm always learning from them, which is, which is great. And

3:18

but when it comes to what kinds of technologies we actually end up acquiring in our household. You know, I think the most thought and conversations have gone into our children's, we have two children, our children's technologies and the devices that they may either have access to, or come to be owners of themselves. And then you know, just like most folks who think about the if, and I don't even know if that they think about it, but that are just in trying to be intentional about the place of technology and mass media in their lives. You know, we talk about what kinds of streaming entertainment we want to, you know, invest in and what kinds of devices we will all choose to engage in. And so like I say, in the book, we haven't drawn a hard line on keeping the text out of the house. And arguably, I think when you don't draw the hard line and you say, Okay, well we're gonna have tablets and laptops and smartphones and we're gonna have the Netflix and the Apple TV and, and the, the YouTube that it streams through the television, right? Like once you let all that in, then it makes for a lot of decisions that you have to make right all the time. Right. And