New York Times Frank Bruni Talks Technology With UCSD Students

In a nation like ours without a shared ethnicity or religion, a shared popular culture has always taken on large significance. Events like a Presidential Inauguration, the Super Bowl, or the Academy Awards are secular events that we experience together.

But New York Times Op-Ed Political and Cultural Columnist Frank Bruni argues that those communal cultural events are becoming few and far between.

In October, Bruni was a featured speaker at UC San Diego addressing first year students about the effect that technological advances have had on American lives, specifically the narrow niches that separate us and our increasingly customized cocoons.

Bruni will address what he calls a lack of intellectual diversity in the modern era. He said the growth of information technology has been segregating communities rather than connecting them.

“We’ve developed this thing called the Internet which in theory speeds us to each other faster than ever before, speeds us to information and should be expanding our worlds,” Bruni said. “But the weird thing is the way most people use technology and the Internet is not to expand their worlds but to contract them.”

Bruni said technological development and proliferation has resulted in a global economy based on narrow specialization.

“We are in the era of the expert and part of that’s about the global economy. And the premium placed on a very particular kind of knowledge,” he said. “So we have entered an age, professionally speaking, of ever greater expertise and specialization.”

The talk is part of UC San Diego Extension's 2014-15 Helen Edison Lecture Series.

Other featured speakers include California historian Kevin Starr and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.