Media Revolutions: From Scroll to Screen

Catalog description

This course surveys the history of media from the ancient world to the present. Taking 'media' in the broadest sense to encompass the full range of communications technologies, we will begin with the papyri scrolls of ancient Greece and move from there through the manuscript codex of the Middle Ages, the printed book of the age of Gutenberg, newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries, radio and film in the 20th century, and the internet and social media of our own digital age. Several recurrent questions will frame our survey of media landscapes: How, to what ends, and in what institutional settings are particular media used? How do they affect modes of thinking? And what are the relations of different media to the various historical forms of religious, political, and economic power?