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• Digital Tsunami Film Screening

  • When
    29 Oct 2025
  •  
    6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

  
  

  Come Join Us In Person at the Players in NYC

  for a Special Screening of

  Digital Tsunami

  A Film by Fred Peabody

  The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the director, producer, and other participants. The event is free to attend, with a cash bar available for attendees. Registration is required for entry.

  To Register Click Here

  To watch the trailer on Vimeo click here.

  This screening is sponsored by the

  Institute of General Semantics

  and co-sponsored by the

  New York Society for General Semantics

  and

  Media Ecology Association

  

  We are engulfed in a digital tsunami—a toxic mix of artificial intelligence, state and corporate surveillance and social media addiction controlled by powerful algorithms. DIGITAL TSUNAMI shows how these are all part of a digital ecosystem that is changing us as humans—just as the prophetic media guru Marshall McLuhan predicted 60 years ago.

  
  

  “Director Fred Peabody (All Governments Lie, The Corporate Coup d’État) brings his signature journalistic rigour to timely examination of the ills of social media.… a chilling illustration of the pervasive nature that screens hold.”

  —Pat Mullen, POV magazine

  From the director, Fred Peabody: “After making ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE and THE CORPORATE COUP D’ÉTAT, I wanted my next film to be about the growing digital dystopia that is engulfing all of us. DIGITAL TSUNAMI is the film I came up with, and I believe it can make a difference. Like THE CORPORATE COUP D’ÉTAT and ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE, it documents injustice and societal harm being overlooked or underestimated because people are not seeing the big picture and historical context. It completes a trilogy of films bringing critical thought to crucial problems faced by society. Many of us are aware that if we don’t fix our planet’s natural, physical ecology, we’re doomed. Fewer people realize that if we don’t fix our planet’s 'media ecology' we may also be doomed. The good news is, we don’t have to be doomed. We can fix things. As I began researching this project, I was surprised to find that the famed 'media guru' Marshall McLuhan had warned of these problems back in the sixties, even though the press inaccurately portrayed him as a cheerleader for the electronic/digital revolution. If McLuhan were alive today, I think he’d say exactly what he said in 1966: 'The only alternative is to understand everything that’s going on, and then counter and neutralize it as much as possible, turn off as many buttons as you can, and frustrate them as much as you can...I don’t choose to just sit and let the juggernaut roll over me.'”

  Filmmaker Bios: 

  Fred Peabody produced, wrote, and directed the Emmy-nominated 2016 feature documentary ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE and the 2018 feature documentary THE CORPORATE COUP D’ÉTAT. The films premiered at TIFF and HOT DOCS respectively, and received high ratings on ARTE, ZDF, and STARZ. ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE won the Directors Guild (DGC) Allan King Award for Excellence in Documentary. Fred is an Emmy-winning journalist and filmmaker whose credits include 7 years as producer-director at ABC 20/20 (where he won an Emmy and received 4 Emmy nominations), and 7 years as producer-director on the CBC investigative series The Fifth Estate.

  Filmmaker, journalist, writer, Peter Raymont has produced and directed over 100 films and TV series during his 53-year career. His documentary feature, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire was honoured with the 2007 Emmy for Best Documentary and the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival. Raymont’s films are often provocative investigations of “hidden worlds” in politics, the media, and big business. Guantanamo’s Child: Omar Khadr (2016) was nominated for an Emmy and received three Canadian Screen Awards. Raymont was an Executive Producer, along with Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer of Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band. He was the Executive Producer of, Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On which won the 2023 International Emmy for Best Arts Documentary and Unloved: Huronia’s Forgotten Children, which premiered at 2022 Hot Docs International Film Festival. Plastic People is his most recent documentary feature, which had its world premiere at the 2024 SXSW Festival.

  Registration is free. All attendees must be registered in order to gain admittance to the club. This includes any guests you might want to bring with you.

  The program will take place in the Dining Hall on the 1st floor of the club. Please note that, as an historic 19th century landmark, the site is not handicap accessible. Dress code is business casual and is strictly enforced, including no sneakers, shorts, ripped jeans, t-shirts).

  Show details
• 40th Anniversary Conversation about No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior with Joshua Meyrowitz

  • When
    12 Nov 2025
  •  
    6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
  • Location
    The Players Club, 16 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY 10003

  Register

  40th Anniversary Conversation about No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior with Joshua Meyrowitz

  
  

  Please join us on Wednesday, November 12, 2025, for a conversation with author Joshua Meyrowitz about his groundbreaking 1985 book, No Sense of Place. Dr. Meyrowitz will discuss the origin and substance of the book with Professor Paul Levinson, and we will save time after the discussion for book signings.

  Praise for No Sense of Place:

  “One of the handful of most important books published in the late twentieth century, not just in the field of communication and media studies, but in the social sciences overall…. No other work has so effectively bridged the macro-theory of media history writ large with the micro-social study of interpersonal relations and the way they have been influenced by the wider technological sphere…. No Sense of Place seems even more relevant to understanding our current web-defined digital internet world…. Meyrowitz saw a future that is now the present.” – Paul Heyer, Communication Studies, Laurier University

  “His arguments about place-shifting media, which seemed radical at the time, now help us to understand the social consequences of newer electronic and digital media…. His genius was that he wrote about general ‘characteristics of media’ and ‘patterns of information flow’ and created a logical, deductive, ‘if‐then’ framework that affords us new insight. His framework is applicable to all communication technologies and remains remarkably fresh. Indeed, in his final chapter ‘Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going,’ Meyrowitz outlines trends and describes forms of media that were barely perceptible or not yet in existence when he was writing.” – Rich Ling, Copenhagen, Denmark, IT University of Copenhagen

  “Highly insightful and deeply original… astonishingly prescient in identifying the themes and debates that would shape the next few decades of thinking. What is the public sphere, how is the relation between public and private being reconfigured by the electronic media, how can traditions of knowledge management – that protected children and excluded women – be sustained in the information age and what will follow from their demise?... Meyrowitz’s scholarship was impeccable, his writing elegant and engaging, and his range truly astonishing, capturing the key themes of our age with unerring accuracy and insight.” – Sonia Livingstone OBE, London School of Economics and Political Science

  
  

  Panelists

  Joshua Meyrowitz, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA, where he has won numerous honors, including the Lindberg Award for Outstanding Scholar-Teacher in the College of Liberal Arts. Dr. Meyrowitz’s teaching and research interests include mass media, media history, corporate vs. non-corporate media, critical analysis of news, war news and war propaganda, medium theory, media production variables, qualitative research methods, and pan-disciplinary communication theory. In addition to authoring No Sense of Place and a book on a half-century struggle to protect the core property in Durham, NH, from overdevelopment, he has published over 100 articles on media and society that have appeared in scholarly journals and anthologies, as well as in general-interest magazines and newspapers.

  Paul Levinson, Ph.D., is Professor at Fordham University. His science fiction novels include The Silk Code (winner of the Locus Award for Best First Science Fiction Novel of 1999), The Consciousness Plague, The Pixel Eye, Borrowed Tides, The Plot to Save Socrates, Unburning Alexandria, Chronica, and It's Real Life: An Alternate History of the Beatles. His novelette “The Chronology Protection Case” was made into a short film and is on Amazon Prime Video. His novelette, “Robinson Calculator,” was published in the Robots Through the Ages anthology in July 2023. He was President of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) 1998-2001. His nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge, Digital McLuhan, and New New Media, have been translated into 15 languages. 

  
  

  This event will take place from 6 PM to 9 PM Wednesday, November 12 at the historic Players Club in Gramercy Park. 

  Registration is free, but all attendees must be registered in order to gain admittance to the club. This includes any guests you might want to bring with you.

  The program will take place in the Library on the 2nd floor of the club. Please note that, as an historic 19th century landmark, the site is not handicap accessible. Dress code is business casual and is strictly enforced, including no sneakers, shorts, ripped jeans, or t-shirts.

  
  

  Show details