Video (television, film, the moving image) is today’s most popular and powerful information source. Two-thirds of global internet traffic is video, and the number continues to climb. Today, Americans get their news and information from screens, speakers and video platforms rather than the “printed” word. The growing impact of this “force” in our society has no precedent in history and those who are involved in publishing, education or any form of print production, discover this to their cost. They now operate in a world where video has become the dominant medium of human communication. While you read this, hundreds of billions of cameras are busy recording and producing more moving images.

Cambridge Forum invites author Peter B. Kaufman to discuss the findings of his new book, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual (MIT Press). Kaufman describes video’s vital role in politics, law, education, and entertainment today, only 130 years since the birth of film. He explains how the moving image—not social media, not A.I., but TV networks and online video—has played such an outsized role in bringing personalities like Trump, Putin, Modi, and Netanyahu to the front of the world stage – and thus to our attention.

According to Kaufman, the implications of Amazon controlling US retail book sales, and the tightening concentration of ownership in the publishing world should raise public concerns not just about censorship, but about the hyper-consolidation of power across all communication industries. “If freedom involves participation in power, we are losing our grip on both. And that grip will disappear entirely if we let go of our control over the moving image.”

Joining Peter Kaufman will be Robert S. Boynton, the director of the Literary Reportage program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Boynton has written about culture and ideas for The New Yorker (where he has been a contributing editor) and Harper’s (where he has been a senior editor). His work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Lingua Franca, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Republic, The Nation, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and other publications.

Speakers

Peter B. Kaufman

Peter B. Kaufman is Senior Program Officer at MIT Open Learning and author of several books, including The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge. He is founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company working with cultural and educational institutions around the world.

Robert S. Boynton

Robert S. Boynton, the director of the Literary Reportage program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. His book, The Invitation Only Zone, about North Korea’s Japanese abduction project, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2016. The New New Journalism was published by Vintage Books in 2005.