Meaning of Information Technology - Themes

Meaning and Society
This class will be precisely true to its title; we will be principally examining, not how to use software, and not how to build a more successful corporation using the latest technology, but the meaning of information technology. What, precisely, is information technology, anyway? What is its relation to other technologies? What are its history and its prehistory? What is its meaning to local, national, and international governing bodies? In short, what are the political, ideological, ethical and economic impacts of information technology?

The principle object of study will be the Internet. However, we will also review other issues germane to both new technologies and information technology: artificial intelligence, hacking, wi-fi, and convergence (or the tendency for technologies to meet each other), for example.

Meaning and the Individual
We will also spend a significant amount of time, however, not only on the impact of information technology on politics, but on its meaning for the individual. How does such technology change what those values that most of think of as eternal: what it means to be human, for example? What sexuality means? What it means to think and to feel? What the value of rationality is? With any luck at all, this portion of the class discussion should produce some mild discomfort when discussing the impact on gender roles, or the stability of you sense of self when we touch on technology and gender, or technology, stability, and selfhood.

Meaning and Culture
We will be intensely interested in how these technologies are represented in the arts, so we shall examine literature, film, and art websites for an aesthetic dimension in Information technologies. How has technology traditionally been represented? How does contemporary representation differ from its aesthetic predecessors? What is this postmodernism stuff anyway, and are you already postmodern?