Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
“The Digital Divide: Inside and Outside Chabad’s Use of Media” – Prof. Sharrona Pearl
January 16, 2013 at 6:00 PM
| Location: | 303 Paterson Hall |
| Cost: | Free |
Prof. Sharrona Pearl from the University of Pennsylvania will be speaking at Carleton University on “The Digital Divide: Inside and Outside Chabad’s Use of Media” the evening of Jan 16th.
The Chabad media empire is stunning in its depth and breadth. And yet the pioneers of online religious presence recently ordered all of its high schoolers to close their facebook accounts. How do we reconcile Chabad’s sophisticated use of the digital sphere for recruitment purposes with their seeming resistance to its application in their daily lives? How is this simple dichotomy complicated by the importance of the virtual Rebbe as a way of uniting the community across ever-larger geographic distances? In this talk, Professor Pearl will explore the tension between the inside and the outside in Chabad practice as represented by the digital sphere. Ultimately, she will argue, Chabad’s institutional use of the internet is as a space to disseminate information rather than create community. The internet is, for Chabad, a temporary space designed to bring people together in the real world