Instructor's Prospectuses for
Classes
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version)
| The following are the instructor's advance prospectuses for
each class. They provide a sense of the overall narrative of the
course, a rationale for each assemblage of readings, and an initial
orientation (to be extended, probed, or diverged from) for students
preparing presentations. The prospectuses are not binding, since
inevitably plans will change and sharpen during final class preparation. |
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= Supplementary Links
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CLASS 1:
Jan. 11 |
INTRODUCTION (Prospectus)
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| "Awareness
of the mechanism": Much of this class will be taken
up by course mechanics, which bulk larger in courses with
a technological component. To give a sense of what is at stake
for literature students investigating information culture,
we will follow this explanation of course mechanics by juxtaposing
Wordsworth's
and Gibson's
poems. Both poems are about memory; both are about place;
but only one is explicitly about technology (Gibson: "awareness
of the mechanism"). Is the "motion and a spirit"
that "rolls through all things" in "Tintern
Abbey" a premonition or criticism of the Internet? And
why, at the end, is Gibson "laughing
/ in the mechanism"?
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes to facilitate
class discussion
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The
Age of Knowledge Work |
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CLASS 2:
Jan. 13 |
"LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS"
(Prospectus) |
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Our initial
unit of classes (classes 2-4) on "knowledge
work" takes the form of an interactive lecture on
the dominant social, economic, and technical forces that have
made information the equivalent of what classical philosphers
called universal "nature." The instructor will review
the postindustrial philosophy of Knowledge Work and ask students
to think critically about the axioms and tenets of this philosophy.
If the most fundamental philosophical question in classical
times was "what is the good life?" then what is
the answer to this question in year 2000 when the most influential
philosophers are business
gurus?
"Creative Destruction" and the New Millennium:
The first class in this unit focuses on the perspective of
contemporary business gurus.
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
to facilitate class discussion
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CLASS 3:
Jan. 18 |
"NETWORK
ENTERPRISE" (Prospectus) |
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| Capitalism
and Informationalism: This class makes the transition
from the internal perspective of business to a scholarly perspective
on business. We use the work of Manuel
Castells to gain a global and historical perspective on
contemporary knowledge work. Especially crucial for our future
thought about information culture is Castells' argument that
the advanced capitalism of knowledge work and informationalism
(the first a "mode of production," the second a
"mode of development") are not necessarily—but
only historically and contingently—locked to each other.
(See a review-essay
on Castells' work.)
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
to facilitate class discussion
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CLASS 4:
Jan. 20 |
"SYMBOLIC
ANALYSTS" (Prospectus)
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| Philosopher-Kings
of the Post-Republic: This final class in our unit on
knowledge work focuses on Daniel Bell and Robert Reich, whose
simultaneously public and academic writings on postindustrialism
have offered highly-influential general theories of knowledge
work. Bell on "technocrats" and Reich on "symbolic
analysts" represent the generation of social theorists
who arose after the 1970's to address the so-called New
Class (the now dominant professional, managerial, technical
class) with the same sweeping overview with which in the 1950's
C.
Wright Mills took on the the "white collar"
and "power elite" or William
H. Whyte the "organization man." A particularly
salient topic for us in the university is the relation between
acacemic intellectuals and symbolic analysts. What is the
role of an intellectual
in the age of knowledge work? What is the role of an academic
intellectual? What paradigm do our authors for this class—Bell
and Reich—themselves offer for contemporary intellectualism?
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
to facilitate class discussion
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CLASS 5:
Jan. 25 |
PROJECT
WORKSHOP 1 (Prospectus) |
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| In this class,
we break into teams and begin the practical work of the course.
In light of our previous classes, of course, such team work
will also serve as a first-hand experiment in "knowledge
work." Our teamwork will be an allegory, reflection upon,
and/or critique of knowledge work.
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
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Introduction
to the Prehistory & History of Information |
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CLASS 6:
Jan. 27 |
FROM
NATURE TO INFORMATION (Prospectus) |
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The main idea
behind this next unit of the course (classes 6-11) is to offset
the narrowly contemporary notion of information by reviewing
the wider context of prehistorical and historical ages of
information—ages in which literature played an integral
role.
The Hole in Nature and the Photograph: This first class
in the unit is premised on Albert Borgmann's schema of the
evolution of information from "ancestral" to technological
times. But our concrete object of study is Andy
Goldsworthy, a contemporary British artist whose work
provides a particularly suggestive analogue of ancestral or
"natural" information. What does Goldsworthy's land-art
tell us about (in the terms of Borgmann's semiosis of information)
the relations between Intelligence, Person, Sign, Thing, and
Context? What additional role is played by the Tool (an understated
but crucial dimension in Goldsworthy)? And, thinking ahead
to Walter Benjamin's essay in our next class, what is the
status of Goldsworthy's photographs?
There are also remarkable affinities between Goldsworthy and
Wordsworth (whom we touched upon in our first
class). Goldsworthy has been called a "New
Romantic."
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
to facilitate class discussion
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CLASS 7:
Feb. 1 |
(continued)
(Prospectus)
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| Aura
and Distraction: Walter
Benjamin's essay on "the
artwork in the age of technical reproducibility"
(as the title is sometimes literally translated) remains one
of the single most rewarding discussions of culture and technology.
The essay may be read with fresh relevance in the context
of the information age. Of special interest is Benjamin's
thought on the relation between "nature," "auratic"
art, and mechanical reproductions; on the relation between
"reproduction" and "transmission," and
on reception in the mode of "distraction." Benjamin's
unfinished Arcades
Project, recently edited and translated, is also of
remarkable relevance to the information age of databases and
hypertext (though we will not be able to take up this gigantic
project in our class). Consider, for example,the resonance
between the Arcades Project and Vannevar
Bush or Ted Nelson's
early notions of hypertext.
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
to facilitate class discussion
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CLASS 9:
Feb. 8 |
SPEAKING,
WRITING, READING, INFORMING
(Prospectus) |
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Following upon our classes on the emergence
of information from prehistory, our next series of classes
in this unit aims to introduce the subsequent history of
information. A full history would need to account at least
for these epochs in the technologies, media, and civilizations
of information: orality, literacy, print, numeracy, analog
electronics, digital and online electronics. Since it is
not possible to cover all these topics, we focus on just
several moments of transition between these epochs:
From Socrates to Plato: In the present class, we think
about the transition between cultures dominated by orality
and those dominated by literacy. (Quick! What was your phone
number or address ten years ago? What did you put down on
Schedule A, line 24 of last year's tax form? What is the
topic of class 3 in this course? In short, how would the
psychology, sociology, economics, or politics of life differ
if you could not write any of this down?) We'll consider
Socrates' classic answer to such questions in his Phaedrus;
and we'll use Walter J.
Ong's well-known study of the "psychodynamics"
of orality and literacy to understand the psychological,
anthropological, sociological, and philosophical determinants
behind the Socratic position.
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
to facilitate class discussion
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CLASS 10:
Feb. 10 |
(Continued)
(Prospectus) | |
| "A poem
should be equal to / Not true": This class jumps
from the the emergence of literacy to the early part of the
twentieth century. Here we focus on the New
Criticism's meditation on the "close reading"
amid an industrial, technical, and mass-media world that was
moving to the paradigm of information. How did "close
reading" as a powerful ideology of literacy arise in
this context? What is the actual relationship of close reading
and related paradigms of modern "critical thought"
("careful and critical discourse" or "CCD,"
Alvin
W. Gouldner called it) to the mode of thought the Frankfurt
School called technological rationality? What is the fate
of close reading and its "rigorous" deconstructive
successor in the era of easy "browsing"? And, thinking
ahead to our next class: can browsing be understood as itself
a positive rather than negative act (a different kind of rigorous
reading rather than a lack of reading)?
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
to facilitate class discussion
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CLASS 12:
Feb. 17 |
PROJECT
WORKSHOP 3 (Prospectus) | |
| Each team should
now be able to show some work on their project. We continue
our discussion of the practical and conceptual issues related
to each project.
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
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Acts
of Information, 1948-2000 |
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CLASS 13:
Feb. 22 |
COMMUNICATING
(Prospectus)
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The "Acts
of Information" unit of our course (classes 13-19) brings
the story up to date by addressing informationalism and information
technology in the twentieth century. We study the historical
sequence of major modern paradigms of information—the
paradigms, that is, that make experiential sense of what it
means to engage with information technology: information as
communication, as media, as the mainframe, as networking,
etc.
"Operator, operator": This first class in the
unit looks at the implications of the model of telecom
"communication" or "transmission" that
became dominant by mid century and that in combination with
the models of broadcast media and mainframe computing set
the distinctive tone of modern information culture from c.
1948-1975. Our specific focus of attention in this class is
the classic communication theory of Shannon and Weaver.
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
A to facilitate class discussion
Notes B to facilitate
class discussion
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CLASS 16:
Mar. 2 |
INTERFACING
(SEEING/DESIGNING)
(Prospectus) | |
This section
of our unit on Acts of Information brings the story of information
forward from mid-century to the digital present. Our organizing
topic is the successor to both the paradigms of communicating
and mediating: "interfacing" (which incorporates
both "personal computing" and "networking").
Our general questions will be: what was the experience of
the interface in the age of the mainframe computer? How does
that experience change in the personal computer/network age?
And how does contemporary "interface culture" (as
Steven Johnson terms it) not only recapitulate communicating
and mediating but extend these acts of information in new
directions?
Colussus
(aka Panopticon):
This class reviews the history
of twentieth-century computing to define the mainframe
paradigm that dominated from the 1950's
through 1970's, and so prepares us to understand the transition
to the subsequent network paradigm. Teaser question: why was
the Post-It™ note such a successful invention at the
height of the mainframe age?
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes A to facilitate class discussion
Notes B to facilitate
class discussion
Notes C to facilitate
class discussion
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CLASS 17:
Mar. 7 |
(Continued)
(Prospectus)
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| "Look
and Feel": This class advances the idea of the "interface"
by considering (with the aid of Zuboff and Heidegger) the
conflicted phenomenology of "vision" that characterized
the mainframe computing. We also review the evolution of twentieth-century
typographical design, whose manifestation in everything from
magazines to TV ads still conditions the "look and feel"
of the computer interfaces that succeeded the mainframes.
The goal of the class is to correlate the historical transition
from the mainframe to personal-computing/networking (or client/server)
ages with the phenomenological and aesthetic evolution in
graphical user interfaces (GUI's) that resulted in our present
windowed, hyperlinked, and networked spaces of (as Gibson
put it) "consensual
hallucination." Kirschenbaum's paper is especially
noteworthy for its perspective on digital information as an
aesthetic "look." The fundamental hypothesis of
this class is that to understand the contemporary interface
of information we may now need to see reading as a variant
of looking, and knowledge as a variant of "design."
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
to facilitate class discussion
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CLASS 19:
Mar. 14 |
SECURING (Prospectus)
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| "Secure
Connection": The Anxiety of Information: It would
be possible to extend this series of classes to further contemporary
paradigms of information—e.g., information as entertainment
(we'd focus on the clash between youth subcultures of digital
music or gaming and the media conglomerates), information
as identity (we'd use Sherry Turkle's work to study the psychology
of computing), information as a religion or form of belief
(we'd start with David Noble's work on the historical association
between Western technology and transcendence), information
as discrimination or what Pierre Bourdieu calls "distinction"
(partly covered in our next class), etc. For lack of time,
however, we will bring our series of informational paradigms
to a close on the topic of security. Sometimes when we negotiate
with our system administrators or read in the media about
hackers
and "cyberterrorism,"
we get the overwhelming feeling that information is not about
communication, media, knowledge, work, entertainment, or anything
else. It is about security.
The readings for this class—statements from computer
security experts coupled with Donna Haraway on the postmodern
science of the human immune system—will allow us to get
a measure of the fantasia of information security. How does
the myth of information security, privacy, etc., function
as a compensatory allegory for the basic social insecurities—medical,
economic, psychological, etc.—that define who "we"
(the interconnected community of information and contagion,
the Borg)
now are?
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
to facilitate class discussion
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Art
2000 |
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CLASS 20:
Mar. 16 |
THE
STRANGE WEB: ART, HACKING, TERRORISM
(Prospectus) |
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| Art = Hacking?
We conclude the course by thinking about the function of art
in the age of knowledge work. This topic requires considering
both the aesthetics and politics of the information age (and
therefore such issues as class, ethnic, and geopolitical difference
in information culture). By seeking to compare, but also to
differentiate, the hacker, terrorist, and artist we attempt
in this class to understand certain recent currents in the
relation of art to information. Should the literary and other
arts cherish, or deface, the thing most valued by knowledge
work: information? What kind of art will make a difference
in the cubicle of the knowledge worker? Or are we only talking
of screensavers, colorful calendars, and funny cartoons pinned
to the cubicle wall?
Back
to schedule of readings for this class
Notes
to facilitate class discussion
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DATE/TIME
TBA |
FORMAL
PRESENTATION OF ONLINE PROJECTS
(Prospectus) |
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| Projects will
be presented to the class, and possibly also to other members
of the department. |
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