On Wednesday 26th May, we will discuss The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet, by Roisin Kiberd. Freely available written and audio-visual resources are linked below. Regular attendee Mar will introduce the book to place these pieces in context, and enable anyone attending to hear about the work. You are welcome to attend to listen to the discussion even if you have not read any of the texts or listened to the audio-visual material.

This is an online event, which will be held from 7.30-9.30pm via Zoom. For Zoom details, which we keep private to group members, please contact us. Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend. Please contact us about any accessibility requirements. We aim to make the sessions a welcoming space for anyone interested in the topic, you do not need to have a university education or have ever been to a reading group before, and we welcome people who have not read the text but would like to listen! Please contact us if you have any questions.

For this session, if you do not read the book, or are interested in additional material, please take a look at one or more of the below:

• Bland God: Notes on Mark Zuckerberg (essay)
• Tinder Gold takes us nearer to the app’s grim endpoint: robot-style dating (Guardian article)
• Writing in the Age of the Internet (25 minute video). “Kiberd discusses ideas from some of the most relevant and prescient books about online culture, and offers essential first principles on writing about the internet – about how we can best observe ‘the collision of the human with the system’.” (embedded below)
• Living online and IRL (42 minute radio programme, episode of BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week)

This event is the third and final in a series on digital technology. You don’t need to come have to the previous sessions on TechGnosis or Surveillance Capitalism to attend – but you may like to catch up a little via our write-ups of the sessions for Amplify Stroud.

“We all live online now: the line between the internet and IRL has become porous to the point of being meaningless. Roisin Kiberd knows this better than anyone. She has worked for tech startups and as the online voice of a cheese brand; she’s witnessed the bloated excesses of tech conferences and explored the strangest communities on the web. She has traced the ripples these hidden worlds have sent through our culture and politics, and experienced the disorienting effects on her own life. In these interlinked essays, she illuminates the subject with fierce clarity, revealing the ways we are more connected than ever before, and the disconnect this breeds. From the lure of the endless scroll, to the glamour of self-optimisation; from the cult of Energy Drinks to the nostalgic world of Vaporwave music; and from silicon town centres to dating tech bros, Kiberd explores the strange worlds, habits and people that have grown with the internet. She asks what we have gained, what we have lost, and what we have given willingly away in exchange for this connected life.”

– Publisher information (Serpent’s Tail)