Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examination of the emergence and shaping of information and communication technologies and science in the digital age. Explores new media and social change between everyday life, social institutions, and various enterprises. Emphasis is placed on social context and relations of power. This course can be repeated once for credit if second topic is different (up to a maximum of two times).

COURSE DETAILS:

Topic for Spring 2025:  The Information Age

We are said to live in an “information age”. Information technologies, like modern digital computers and the Internet, have been credited with ushering in an era of unprecedented capacity for information creation, collection, storage, and communication. Indeed, in 2020, the amount of digital data created, copied, and consumed was 59 zettabytes. That is a number with twenty one zeroes and one that far exceeds the estimated number of grains of sand on the earth by more than three times. But what is the character of all this information? Data alone do not produce meaning. All of that digital capacity has to be made useful through interpretation, meaningful encoding, use, and context. How is this digital capacity put to work to forge new forms of society, discourse, power, and knowledge? How do these fit in the longer history of technology and society? How do we understand ourselves, one another, and the world differently through the lens of that information? In this course, we explore these questions by looking to the history of information, information technologies, and information sciences - a history that long predates the digital computer. We will look at the history of technologies themselves - from the printing press and the postal service to computers and radar. We will also explore the social and political contexts - from the Antebellum era to the Cold War - that shaped the development, meaning, and use of those technologies. We will explore forms of identity, knowledge, power, and community that have emerged within this information age.  Finally, we will explore the history of information itself, what it is, what it has meant historically to be informed, and the politics and frictions within it. Our goal is to unpack the histories, technologies, and contexts that shape our increasingly digital world.

Broad Course Themes:

• Data and Society
• The Information Age
• History of Computing and AI
• Critical Technology Studies

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: