On 29 April, the North American sociologist and writer Nicole Aschoff will take part in the Foros 2020 lecture series with a videoconference open to the public and entitled “Smartphones, Smart Cities, and the Digital Frontier”. In her talk, she will address the extent to which relationships, structures and ingrained ideas and activities using smartphones are at the centre of significant changes to capitalism, thus laying the foundations for a new paradigm of appropriation and exploitation. "Smartphones have become a pervasive feature of modern life in the last decade. However, our framework to assess the importance of these pocket computers often focuses on issues of addiction or self-presentation, and ignoring the role smartphones play in the digital frontier," she explained.

Nicole Aschoff is a sociologist, writer and editor. She is the author of the The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power and Resistance in the New Gilded Age and The New Prophets of Capital. Aschoff holds a PhD in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University and is currently the general editor of the Jacobin journal and editor-in-chief at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. 

This new edition of Foros, an annual lecture series on architecture, has been given the following title "Co-benefits". Foros 2020 aims to reflect on the links between and processes of cultural interaction between contemporary architecture and other art forms such as dance, sculpture, film or comic books.

Language: English