|Semester and Year||SP 2012| |Time||6:20 PM - 9:00 PM| We say we
live in the Information Age as if such an age never existed
before. But throughout time, the introduction of new forms of
media and communication technologies have had a transformational
effect on existing social, political, and economic life,
creating new perceptual pathways to our understanding. This
course examines history through the prism of these communication
“revolutions,” beginning with the arrival of the spoken word,
the development of writing systems, the spread of the printed
word, the age of electricity, before focusing on the modern era
of digital media. It is through our investigation of these
previous revolutions that we may come to some greater
understanding about the promise, and consequence, of our own
technological age. Possible readings: Jay David Bolter, Turing’s
Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age ; James Carey, Culture
as Communication ; Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as
an Agent of Change ; Eric Havelock,