Our present and near future are defined by our options. We have come to enjoy unprecedented speed and accessibility of information. As beautiful and liberating as this feels, it has not advanced fundamental understanding. It’s easy to blame the confusion for our lack of progress. Understanding and Confusion are enemies, it’s true, but confusion is an effect not a cause. Besides, confusion is more fun than understanding anyway.

Like the canvas and pop song once were, the lecture is a medium. It is an option. This magazine is dedicated to promoting, encouraging and informing its readers about the culture of the lecture. The lecture is our tool of choice for perpetuating the cause of understanding in an otherwise unintelligible time. And the exact opposite. The Lecture doesn’t have to be art or innovation to be effective.

Practical sentence: there are a handful of tangibilities that make a lecture more vital than alternate communication options. One of the palest misconceptions about digital communication is that it allows for unseen degrees of interactivity. This is blanketly false. The telephone is more interactive than the message board. The internet is for cowards. It’s easy and non-confrontational – exactly like the 21st century. Lecturing is scary, but it’s more fun, educational and, I assure you, interactive than the comforting anonymity you find inside a computer.

If we’re not careful, we are going to lose the capacity for speech. Automation makes speech more and more useless everyday. Technology allows us to create our very own personalized universes. Communication was once a survival technique, now it is as useful as my appendix. No one under thirty knows how to communicate properly, it confuses us. This is one reason for starting the Lecture Series – to learn how communication works. Maybe we at the Lecture Series are grandma-dinosaurs, but we’d hate to see vocal expression buried under a bonfire of iPods.

The material future (probably) rests on the economy of opinion. The manufacturer is vaporizing. The lecture lets us learn about our world in a manner that optimizes the economy of opinion. The accelerating change that you see outside your window is embodied in the fluid adaptability of the lecture. The lecture is the new power chord. The lecture is as modern as you want it to be. You don’t have to be sober for a lecture.

In our effort to encourage the proliferation of lecture series(plural) around the globe we will report and document the understanding that permeates from our weekly lectures, but we invite readers to ignite their own lecture groups and share the understanding. “Ideas are for everyone.”