This class offers a historical, technical, and social history of several major categories of media technology: print, photography, cinema, telegraphy, telephony, television, video, and computing. The course will focus primarily on the history of these media in the United States, but will look comparatively to other regions as well. Students will learn how new media technologies emerged, how they work, and some of the major turning points in their development and use. Lectures will also emphasize how technological change transformed everyday life in terms of social relations, personal identity, concepts of space and time, and the nature and scale of information. Each unit will feature at least one "primary source" reading in which individual writers and thinkers (including well-known writers such as Frederick Douglass, Virginia Woolf, and Lu Xun) describe their impressions of media such as film and photography when these were relatively "new."
Weekly quizzes will review major names, dates, and concepts. There will be one mid-term (in-class on 4/30) and one final (in-class on 6/4). Students will also complete several short writing reflections over the course of the quarter.