ANTH 270 The Information Society (3 credits)
TTh 11:10-12:25
Dr. Jon W. Anderson (Anderson@cua.edu)
Office hours: Wed 1-3 (10 Marist)
This
course will examine views about the Information Society (imaginative models) and
its social realities (or sources) as phenomena of our times. It focuses on the
social organization of communication, rights to talk and to interpret (e.g.,
censorship, cultural critique), changing registers of knowledge, work,
social interaction and private life, and especially how people relate to computers as
information machines and with others through computers as social machines. It
aims to equip students to think about and to assess claims about information
and communication technologies as central social processes that shape our time.
To that end, students will have opportunities to take the measure of these
ideas and phenomena in projects of their own.
Jean Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
Sharon Traweek. Beamtimes & Lifetimes: the World of High Energy Physicists. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)
J.A. English-Lueck.
cultures@siliconvalley. (Stanford:
Daniel Miller & Don Slater.
The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. (
Mark Smith & Peter Kollock, eds.
Communities in Cyberspace. (New
York: Routledge, 1998)
Format:
Lecture and discussion of readings. This course will have no exams. Instead,
students will submit notes on the readings, at periods indicated, a mid-term
essay on an information technology in their lives and how they use it, and a
project in which they examine another human interaction with an information
technology.
Schedule of Topics
1) Introduction, course plan, requirements. What
is the information society?
2) Getting Past "Third Waves"
Cutting epochal change down to size: the post-industrial society discovery
The Archaeology of Info-Revolutions: the telegraph, telephone, phonograph,
radio
3) Information & Communication Theories
From Communication Theories to Simulacra (Shannon, Deutsch, MacLuhan, Baudrillard)
4) Information after Control - How we really think now
Post-modernity and 'knowledge workers' (Lyotard)
5) The Knowledge Society: How People Think With Machines
Science communities to gadgets
6) Lifecyles of Information &
Information-Workers
Social control & conflict management in knowledge societies
7) Case Study: The Social Construction of the Internet
A Brief History of the Internet, Stages of Internet Development; Internet
Cosmologies
8) Living & Identifying with Technology I: Family, Career, Community
in the Info Society
Silicon Valley: constructing 'culture' where the Info Society is made
9) Globalizing the Information Society
Connecting Developing Countries to the Info Superhighway: On-line in Trinidad
10) Living & Identifying with Technology II: Virtual Communities,
Cyber-selves
Exchange and value in digital worlds
11) Privacy, Freedom & Personal Agency in the Info Society
Cyberdemocracy, Censorship, Blogs
12) Property & Work in the Virtual Community
Internet economies; Open Source as a model for the social life of
free(?) goods
13) Working on the Net? Some critical second-thoughts
Outsourcing Jobs, Networking, IT & Dot-Orgs
14) Internet 2.0 - reprising social networking
Wikipedia,
Google, Friendster to Facebook, and Other User-Generated Content