Digitalizing Culture
Professor William B. Warner
In the years immediately following World War II, scientific work in areas like ballistics, encryption, and computing culminated in the development of the modern digital computer and new disciplines called cybernetics or information technology. At the center of this work was the use of digital code-sequences of 0's and 1's-to accomplish tasks of communication and computation at speeds unattainable by ordinary means. Slowly, these developments in computer science and information theory have penetrated many regions of social life. Digitalizing has not just introduced the computer into our everyday lives or "jacked" us into the Internet. It has also produced new cultural myths, new technologies of the body, and new forms of entertainment. This course will try to understand these developments by studying three kinds of writing in relation to one another: classic texts from the history of information theory (Turing, Weiner, Shannon, etc.); theoretical texts; and science fiction.
