The 2014 Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture features Ian Bogost, at 1:30 pm on Sunday, May 25 in Seattle Sheraton, Redwood A, during the International Communication Association’s 64th Annual Conference, Seattle, May 22 - 26. Ian Bogost is a video game designer, critic and researcher. He holds a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies. He is a founding partner at Persuasive Games. His research and writing consider video games as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues, including airport security, consumer debt, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu and tort reform. In his lecture, Bogost states that thoughts are things. A word that we'd first associate with matter so quickly becomes one of matters, of affairs, incidents, penchants, circumstances, activities, notions. Bogost discusses, how we can learn to live with things, where things mean stuff rather than ideas and events? How do we approach a world so replete, so overburdened with stuff that it's literally falling apart from the wear? How do we think of ourselves as really just another thing among others, rather than their masters and mistresses? How can we respect things for what they are, irrespective of our contact or concern, and how do we really do so, not just late one weird night, but every day, habitually, for real? And how do we do so without descending into the anguish of nihilism, without simply concluding that the universe is fundamentally indifferent? This event is co-sponsored by the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research (www.cccsir.com), University of Illinois, Chicago, and the International Communication Association. For more information about this event, please contact Shing-Ling Sarina Chen, sarina.chen@uni.edu.