Feelings of/from Technology: Analog Bodies in Digital Spaces

Catalog description

While we live in a Digital Age, we have only begun to understand its full significance. What new possibilities arise in a virtualized future? Can we escape scarcity, this planet, even death? What problems might our technologies solve? Modern technologies also raise new existential challenges: Why has the increased prosperity that technologies provide been met with seemingly impoverished and unhappy lives, loneliness, and alienation? How does technology mediate our sense of identity and the relations we have with society, nature, and ourselves? This course will explore the phenomenology of technological life - that is, the descriptive study aimed at looking at the relations between humans and our world, a technologically-mediated world. We will use this experiential and descriptive approach to consider the moral dimensions and psychological and sociological consequences of digital and emerging technologies, especially information and communications technologies (ICTs) like the internet and social media.