Fulfills COAS S & H distribution requirement

“New technologies,” media historian Carolyn Marvin writes, “is a
historically relative term.”  Another way of putting this would be
to say that all forms of media were once considered to be new at
some point in history.  Even media that may seem antiquated by
today’s standards – objects like the telegraph, gramophone,
typewriter, and others – once carried with them both the promise and
peril that we see associated with the internet, mp3s, HDTV, and
cellular telephones.  The bottom line is that all media, new or old,
have a history, a history that both influences and is influenced by
larger historical trends, intellectual currents, and political
movements.  C420 investigates these histories, by exploring the
conditions of possibility of particular media forms in specific
times and places.  It is concerned with the political, economic,
social, and cultural struggles occasioning and occasioned by them,
or the nature of the relationship between media and practices of
social control and resistance.

C420 focuses on a number of dominant, residual, and emergent media,
including orality, writing, printing, telegraphy, telephony, sound
recording, and a range of digital technologies.  In so doing, this
class will engage key empirical, theoretical, and methodological
debates surrounding the media history.  The goals for this course
are threefold.  First, it will explore the strange and exciting
history of media, a history that moves back and forth between
monastic scribes slavishly copying books by hand, prisoners whose
bodies were transformed into media, practitioners of the occult
attempting to communicate with the dead, and people trying to
transcend their bodies by connecting themselves to computers.
Second, this course will challenge commonsense assumptions about the
role of media in history and everyday life.  And finally, it will
encourage you to develop your own research skills as a critical-
historian of media.

In addition to supplementary articles by Anne Balsamo, Simon During,
Lawrence Lessig, John Durham Peters, Jonathan Sterne, and Raymond
Williams, primary texts will be selected from among (but will not
include all of) the following: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The printing
revolution in early modern Europe; Lisa Gitelman & Geoffrey B.
Pingree (eds.), New media 1740-1915; Carolyn Marvin, When old
technologies were new; Armand Mattelart, Networking the world, 1794-
2000; Walter Ong, Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the
word; and Brian Winston, Media, technology, and society: A history
from the telegraph to the internet.

Evaluation likely will be based on attendance and participation, a
group presentation/ facilitation, and a substantive research project
(which will include an annotated bibliography, a prospectus, and a
final research paper).