2026 Summit: The Need for Roots in a Digital Society
The philosopher Simone Weil observed that “uprootedness is by far the most dangerous disease of human societies because it propagates itself.”
Today, we are regularly reminded, in news and surveys, of the disconnection, loneliness, distrust and polarization corroding to modern life. Too many feel ungrounded, untethered: to our peers, our communities, the ecologies that sustain us, even to our own faculties of attention.
The Center for Media Innovation & Social Impact’s 2026 Summit asks: In a twenty-first century digital society, what does it mean to be rooted? In the midst of jarring technological change — and overlapping crises of climate, politics, and attention — how do we maintain ties to what is essential to human flourishing? As thinkers and civic leaders, how do we keep human needs at the forefront as our society grapples with emerging technologies?
The summit will gather scholars, journalists, scientists, community leaders, influencers, technologists, and others to reckon with these growing challenges. We will grapple with questions, such as: What should we demand from new technology, and how do we shift public attitudes from passive acceptance to active engagement — so that the public helps to shape the world being built by new digital technologies?
Panels and workshops will explore the problem of uprootedness related to three intersecting areas: community, ecology and attention; and practical questions about how digital tools can foster — rather than stunt — genuine rootedness. Ecologists and foresters will show how they use digital tools to share their love of the living world and connect to likeminded communities; municipal leaders will explain how they are bridging digital divides; and scientists and engineers will explore how best to pierce the digital distortions to communicate their findings with a skeptical public.
The question is not whether we need roots, but how, in our current conditions, we grow them.
9:00-9:15 Welcome
9:15-10:15 Rootedness in Public Life
A conversation with Marshall Ganz and Jillian Racoosin
We begin with a diagnosis and a question. Seventy-five years ago, Simone Weil identified uprootedness as one of the soul’s deepest afflictions—a condition where people lose connection to place, tradition, community, and meaningful work. She saw it as both a human tragedy and a political emergency. But what does uprootedness look like today?
Marshall Ganz has spent his life understanding how narratives move people to action and build collective power. His foundational work on organizing reveals what binds communities together: shared stories, common purpose, mutual obligation.
Jillian Racoosin is the executive director of the Foundation for Social Connection, the leading organization in the United States devoted to addressing our crisis of disconnection. She will discuss how the foundation is taking concrete steps to change systems and policies that promote place, community, and well-being.
In this conversation, our speakers frame the current crisis and offer solutions: What happens to our humanity, to our capacity for solidarity and action, when we become unmoored from place and tradition? And why aren’t we doing more to prevent this from happening?
10:30-11:25 Touching Grass?
Digital life is often blamed for disconnecting us from the physical world. But this panel asks whether that framing is too simple. Bringing together a food justice advocate, a representative from Niweskok, and an urban technologist writing on the future of environmental tech, the conversation explores whether digital tools and media can actually strengthen our ties to place, ecosystem, and each other, rather than eroding them.
Panelists will draw on grounded, practice-based work, from food sovereignty and Indigenous land stewardship to emerging environmental technologies, to ask what “touching grass” really requires in a networked world. Is rootedness something digital media threatens, or something it can help us reclaim?
Panelists include:
Mark Araujo, Boston Food Forest Coalition
Alivia Moore, Niweskok
Charlie Nutting, Charlielikeswater
Anthony Townsend, Cornell Tech
11:30-12:30 Building Community and Belonging
What does human connection require? In an increasingly digital world, this question has become both more urgent and more complicated. We can now build relationships across vast distances, find communities of shared interest online, and maintain networks that transcend geography. Yet many experience a persistent sense of rootlessness—a hunger for presence, embodied community, and belonging rooted in place.
This panel brings together community leaders, educators, and theologians, to explore what it means to be with others in an age when connection happens both in person and across networks. We’ll examine what’s required to build genuinely loving communities, whether that’s possible online, and how we might cultivate the deeper roots our digital society seems to lack.
Panelists include:
Chaplain Clementina Chéry, Louis D. Brown Peace Institute
James Howard Hill, Jr., Boston University
Wesley Wildman, Boston University
12:00 – 2:00 Lunch and Attention Workshop
Led by Peter Schmidt of the Strother School of Radical Attention, this workshop will focus on developing resistance to the “fracking of human attention.”
2:00 – 3:00 Who Gets to Decide Justice in the Age of AI?
AI systems increasingly guide decisions that play out in local contexts: who gets flagged as a risk, whose neighborhood gets patrolled or invested in, whose voice counts in a dispute. The criminal justice system is one prominent example, but the pattern recurs across many domains where data built and trained far from a community ends up shaping outcomes within it. This panel explores what it means to build systems that are answerable to the communities most affected by them.
Panelists will consider what normative questions about fairness and accountability get decided, often invisibly, in technical design choices; and how local, community rooted approaches to justice can push back against technologies built at scale and at a distance. Ultimately, the question is: in the formal and informal spaces of public life, whose knowledge counts, and who gets to decide?
Panelists include:
Catherine D’Ignazio, MIT
Nathan Matias, Cornell University
Ngozi Okidegbe, Boston University
3:15 – 4:15 A New Civics?
In this closing conversation, we ask: Is a new civics possible? What would it look like? Can we harness technology toward public good and genuine connection rather than extraction and isolation? How do we build political and social structures that acknowledge our need for roots while reimagining civic life for a digital age? And how does our crisis compare to Weil’s diagnosis? What’s different, what’s the same, and what might we learn?
This is an invitation to think together about what we actually owe each other, what structures might make genuine civic life possible, and whether a reimagined relationship to technology itself could be part of the answer.
Panelists include:
Fran Berman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Peter Levine, Tufts University
Briana Millor, Chief of Community Engagement, City of Boston