The Culture of Information: Living in a Digital World

It seems relatively simple to think about the consequences of technology on our lives. Since the development of the automobile and the computer, life is more harried: we are expected to do more, to produce more, to be more places at once. But there are much less obvious ways that new technologies affect us, visible only if one takes a look at the special connection between media (computer, television, film) and form. What is form? Well, of course, there is literary form: the sonnet is a poetic form that first made its way into English during the 16th century; the novel is a prose form that arrived more recently, during the 18th century. But in a broader way, everything we perceive or think is in some form or another, whether it be in the form of a word or an image. Anything formless is also unthinkable. Moreover (and this may surprise you) many literary theorists think that our idea of what it means to be a person -- the set of expectations, beliefs, feelings, and ideas we have about what it means and feels like to be a self -- took on its modern form during the late 18th century.

This class is organized by the various forms that we will consider over the course of the semester: sentence, metaphor, image, self, identity, body, community, authorship, and information. What we want to ask ourselves first is, how does imposing such-and-such a form on reality construct that reality? You might rephrase the question, how does imposing that form onto reality change it, but it is helpful to remember that reality must be always be formed in some way or another in order to be conceivable at all. Even for it to be possible for humans to interact with it at all, reality must have some shape. So we will look at how forms work.

Next, we will think together some questions which presume that form and medium are not really all that different. --Wait, you probably wish to say, are you suggesting that a sentence is like a car??? Well, sort of, except that it is a technology for thinking rather than for moving. What kind of technology is any given form? That is, what kinds of knowledge or feeling do various forms produce, and how? One unit in this course, for instance, will show that metaphors have produced (in the past) the knowledge we needed to develop new technologies and can be harnessed to develop newer and better ones. But if forms can be or can produce technologies, then new media can also produce forms of life and thought. Thinking about technology from the other direction, then, how does any medium, be it a car or a laptop, work beyond what it is designed to do, affecting the way that we habitually think and feel? In one uint, we will look at how the computer program PowerPoint affects our sentences and thus may affect the way we think. Further, one might ask, what kinds of selves are now imaginable, that weren't before, given that we use digital technologies to think with, in the same way that we use sentences to think with? Of course computers enter not only into our practices and habits, but also into our dreams: how do we view ourselves now that we use computers as metaphors for delimiting what it means to be human?

Work Required

Each week, you will post an idea to the class listserv, formulating a question and then writing some ideas you might propose to begin answering the question and/or further questions to which it leads. Post these thoughts before coming to class. On the day of the week that you do not post to the class listserv, you will do a handwritten or typed Response Assignment (under Assignments in Blackboard) to be turned in when you come to class. These daily assignments will receive a check + (95), check (85), or check – (75) for grades.

Early in the semester, you will become a member of one of four groups. Your group will teach a class on 3/23 or 3/25 (right after Spring Break) about how digital technologies have affected Identity (or the Body), or your group will teach a class on 3/30 or 4/1 (the following week) about how digital technologies have affected the Body Politic (Community). You must decide as a group what readings to assign to the class from either of the two anthologies ordered for the class, edited by Trend (Reading Digital Culture) and Wellman (The Internet in Everyday Life); you are also welcome to select readings not found in those readers as long as you can get them to me early enough so that I may photocopy them for the class. Then figure out how best to teach these texts to the class. You may use all kinds of visual images, moving or still, as well as Web sites, PowerPoint presentations, whatever we can access in our wired classroom. The materials you create to teach your texts may be used as part of your final project.

Your final project can be a Web site (perhaps built in Dreamweaver), a conventional paper, a hypertext (perhaps built with Eastgate’s Storyspace), a PowerPoint presentation, or anything from rooms to a chateau or a country in the MOO. In this final project, you will teach first-year students something that you learned this semester. You may use the extensive reserve shelf of materials for ideas about how best to teach using digital images as well as for thinking further about ideas we came up with in class. Students in previous Culture of Information classes have made teaching materials which you can see on line (http://www.units.muohio.edu/englishtech/). You will be asked to meet with me to discuss ideas you have for your project and to write a prospectus for your project – that is, a two-page, typed, double-spaced paper explaining what you want to say and do in your Web site or Final paper. I will make recommendations for further reading based on this prospectus, and then you will turn in an annotated bibliography – a bibliography of articles and books you will (partly) read for writing your final project annotated with a blurb under each item explaining what it is about and why it is important, how related to the idea you are investigating.

Attendance

More than three absences, excused or not, will lower your grade; after five absences, you will be asked to drop the class, except in the case of sustained medical problems recognized as such by the university.

Grades

35%	Listserv Postings and Response Assignments		A+	97-100	C	73-76
			A	93-96	C-	70-72
30%	Lead Class Discussion		A-	90-92	D+	67-69
			B+	87-89	D	63-66
35%	Final Project		B	83-86	D-	60-62
			B-	80-82	F	0-59
			C+	77-79

Schedule of Readings and Assignments:
Due on the date next to which they are listed

T 1/13	Introduction
R/15	Learning Here James Paul Gee, “The 36 Learning Principles” The Medium is the Message / Form of Life McLuhan “The Meduim is the Message,” in Reader Manovich “New Media” and “What New Media is Not” in Reader George Orwell, “The Politics of the English Language” (HO)
T 1/20	Sentence Walter Ong, “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” in Reader Joseph Williams, Style, pp. 71-100
R 1/22	Williams pp. 41-70 Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”
T 1/27	Metaphor Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, read chapters 1-6, 10, 12, 15, 18-19, pp. 3-32, 46-51, 56-60, 77-86, 106-125 Meet with me this week to discuss the technology you wish to use in your final project
R 1/29	Lakoff and Johnson, MWLB, Read Chapters 23-24, pp. 156-194. C. S. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes” in Reader
T 2/3	William Blake, “A Poison Tree” in Reader George Lakoff, “Case Study 1: Anger” in Reader Raymond Gibbs, from The Poetics of Mind in Reader Decide for today which topic you want to teach to the class, Identity or Politics, so that I can put you into a proper group.
R 2/5	Metaphor: Social Control Susan Sontag, from Aids and Its Metaphors in Reader Michael Perelman, “Information as a Commodity and Other Economic Metaphors” in Reader J. M. Balkin, from Cultural Software in Reader Terry Eagleton, [Ideology] in Reader The Virtual in Reader
T 2/10	Metaphor: Creativity Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” in David Trend, ed., Reading Digital Culture pp. 9-13 Steven Johnson, “Bitmapping,” from “The Desktop” in Reader Groups meet this week to discuss what readings you will give to the class; email me the titles / sources; bring me copies of anything not in clas anthologies.
R 2/12	Image: Social Control Daniel J. Boorstin, “From the American Dream to American Illusions? The Self-Deceiving Magic of Prestige” in Reader Sut Jhally, “Image-Based Culture” in Reader
T 2/17	NO CLASS -- EXCHANGE DAY (see Sut Jhally Dreamworlds 2, on reserve)
R 2/19	John Berger, Ways of Seeing pp. 7-64 Reserve materials on Visual literacy / teaching with images: see reserve list in MiamiLink. Due: each person will report in class on what he or she read from the reserve materials about visual literacy / teaching with images.
T 2/24	Berger pp. 66-155 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Image,” “The Rhetoric of Images,” in Image-Music-Text pp. 15-51 Groups meet this week to discuss the readings you have selected and to decide what course materials you will need to create for teaching it.
R 2/26	Image: Creativity Lev Manovich, “The Screen and the User” in Reader Janet Murray, “Immersion” in Reader
T 3/2	Self Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of the Forking Paths” in Everything and Nothing pp. 39-51 “Tlön Uqbar” in EN pp. 12-30 Groups meet this week or next to run through your class presentation, generate discussion questions to be handed out in advance, etc.
R 3/4	Borges, “Borges and I,” “Everything and Nothing” in EN pp. 74-78 Borges, “The Nothingness of Personality” in Reader Current Ideas about How the Mind Works in Reader
T 3/9	MOO (in class) Lakoff, “The Internal Structure of the Self” in Reader Sherry Turkle, “Aspects of the Self” in Reader Turkle, “Who Am We?” in Trend
R 3/11	Meet on the MOO
	SPRING BREAK
T 3/23	Identity or Body (Students leading class discussion will select Texts from Trend and Wellman)
R 3/25	Identity or Body (Students leading class discussion will select Texts from Trend and Wellman)
T 3/30	Body Politic (Students leading class discussion will select Texts from Trend and Wellman)
R 4/1	Body Politic (Students leading class discussion will select Texts from Trend and Wellman)
T 4/6	Narrative Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in IMT pp. 79-124 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cyberage Narratology” in Reader Meet with me this week to discuss final project ideas
R 4/8	Hypertext in Reader Janet Murray, “Story Webs” in Reader Espen Aarseth, “No Sense of an Ending” in Reader Michael Joyce, afternoon, a story
T 4/13	Michael Joyce, afternoon, a story The Turing Game (use External Links in Blackboard) Due: Prospectus for Final Project
R 4/15	The Author Borges, “Pierre Menard” in EN pp. 1-11 Barthes, “The Death of the Author” in IMT 142-148
T 4/20	Laura Mandell, “The Original Author”: (http://www.units.muohio.edu/technologyandhumanities/eng495/paper2.htm) Laura Mandell, “The Original Author: How Digital Technology Reconceptualizes the Author (and the Self)” (HO; External Links) Due: Annotated Bibliography for Final Project
R 4/22	Information: Smart or Dumb Ron S. Turner, The Essential Guide to XML Technologies (HO) Steve Krug, from Don’t Make Me Think! in Reader
T 4/27	Form and Life Henry David Thoreau, from Walden in Reader Class Evaluations
R 4/29	Plato, from The Phaedrus in Reader Previous 495 Web sites, about differences between oral and literate cultures (URLs will be in External Links)
M 5/3	Final Paper, Web, or MOO project due by Final Exam at 4:45 p.m.