Culture as Communication

Catalog description

This course examines the concept of culture through its forms of communication. The shift from orality to literacy to electronic media and now to digital media has important consequences for the social, political, and economic structures within a culture. If we take as axiomatic that every culture wishes to preserve itself through its forms of communication, we then need to ask ourselves which forms of communication are best suited for this purpose. What happens to cultures when traditional forms of communication are forced to compete with the newer technologies? What do we mean by "knowledge" in the age of information? We will examine the development of electronic media, including the newer digital technologies, and analyze their effects on both the individual and cultural level. The course will conclude with an examination of the biases in search engines and how we might be able to resist the attention economy. Readings may include Plato's Phaedrus , Ong's Orality and Literacy, the Bhagavad-Gita , McLuhan's Understanding Media , Safiya Umoja Noble's Algorithms of Oppression and Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing.