Technological Imagination and Social Thought

Catalog description

This course explores what technological changes have been involved in efforts by society to think, organize, imagine, and build a world. New machines engender new kinds of image and story all the time, even as images and stories also affect which new machines get built, and toward which societal ends. Literary and artistic inventions thus provide significant models for building machines and planning society, even as new methods in the social and behavioral sciences often emerge in periods of intensive technological change. Students in this course read closely among significant cultural objects and foundational social theories of technology since industrialization, going both ways down this two-way street, passing from literature and art to political economy and psychology, then back again, on an explanatory tour of society and creativity in a technological age.