Jennifer Egan on storytelling in a data-hooked world

The TED Interview

TED

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jennifer Egan is a journalist and writer whose novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad” won both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Using a unique format—including a whole chapter told through Powerpoint—Egan nimbly explores the mystery and complexity of human life in the digital age. Her newest book, “The Candy House,” poses similar questions around technology, memory, and authenticity. In this episode, the author talks candidly about her creative process, considers the role of the novelist in an increasingly tech-driven world, and makes an argument for why the long-lasting art of fiction has the power to shift and even alter our consciousness.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Have you listened to Talk Radio recently?
0:03.0	Let's talk about this war on white people.
0:05.0	That's a pro-quiling, it's good for you.
0:07.0	Bill the Keystone pipeline, deport illegals, build the wall.
0:10.0	I'm Katie Thornton, host of the divided dial,
0:13.0	a new five-part series from WNMC's On the Media,
0:17.0	about how the American right came to dominate Talk Radio
0:21.0	and how one company is launching a conservative media empire
0:25.0	from the airwaves.
0:26.0	Listen every Tuesday and on the media feed.
0:29.0	Welcome to the TED interview. I'm Stephen Johnson.
0:37.0	If you've been following the news from the technology world,
0:41.0	you might have noticed that the headlines have gotten a little,
0:44.0	well, strangely.
0:46.0	I mean, one big tech company is convinced that in the next few years,
0:50.0	we'll all be moving to some place called the Metaverse.
0:53.0	And just down the road from that tech company,
0:56.0	another tech company is debating whether they've just created
0:59.0	an AI that thinks and feels.
1:01.0	And also, people are making and losing vast fortunes
1:06.0	by buying and selling digital images of board apes.
1:10.0	Now, these are exactly the kind of turbulent developments
	...

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