How did we come to believe so many lies th at we voted into the most powerful political and military post in the world a reality TV star from NBC\, groomed by a reality TV producer from CBS\, w ho then appointed his Cabinet from Fox?
The moving image had somethin g to do with it.
Video (television\, film\, the moving image generall y) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s in ternet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more ofte n from screens and speakers than through any other means. Join BKC co-found er Charles Nesson to discuss Kaufman’s book\, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual (MIT Press). The Moving Image is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived at this point. Kaufman describes video’s vital role in politi cs\, law\, education\, and entertainment today\, only 130 years since the b irth of film. He explains how it’s the moving image—not social media\, not artificial intelligence\, but television networks and online video—that has played such an outsized role in bringing personalities like Trump\, Putin\ , Xi\, Modi\, and Netanyahu to the front of the world stage and in deepenin g what journalist Hanna Rosin calls our “epistemic chasm of cuckoo.”
Kaufman also presents new tools\, best practices\, and community resources for integrating film and sound into media that matters. He offers up new wa ys for us to get a proper handle back on the moving image—how best to produ ce it\, distribute it\, clear rights to it\, authenticate it\, cite it\, an d ultimately archive and preserve it.
Peter B. Kaufma n is Senior Program Officer at MIT Open Learning and Executive Producer of Intelligent Television. Earlier he served as Associate Director of Columbi a University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Educated at Cornell and C olumbia\, Kaufman is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to F ree Knowledge (Seven Stories Press\, 2021)\, The Moving Image: A User’s Man ual (MIT Press\, 2025) and The Fifth Estate: Knowledge and Power in the 21s t Century (Seven Stories Press\, forthcoming).
CATEGORIES:Book Talk LOCATION:Lewis Hall\, 5th floor at the Berkman Klein Center's Multi-Purpose Room 515 GEO:0.000000;0.000000 ORGANIZER;CN="Jessica Weaver":MAILTO:jweaver@law.harvard.edu URL;VALUE=URI:https://hls.harvard.edu/events/the-moving-image-a-users-manua l/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 DTSTART:20250309T070000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR