Information Technologies: A History

Catalog description

Beginning with cave painting, inscription, cuneiform, hieroglyph, and other early textual innovations, this course will survey the creation, production and functionality of writing systems, images, print, sound, bytes and social media - all text technologies employed to communicate. The course will focus on the recording of language, on remembrance and on ideas explicating significant themes seen throughout history: these include censorship, propaganda, authenticity, apocalypticism, technophobia, reader response, skeumorphism, democratization, and authority. We'll learn about the production, transmission and reception of tablet technology, the scroll, the handmade book, the machine-made book, newspapers and ephemera; and we shall investigate the emergence of image, sound, and digital multimedia. We'll examine the impact of these various text technologies on their users, and try to draw out similarities and differences in our cultural and intellectual responses to evolving technologies of communication.