The central theme of this class will be technological change. How have digital technologies transformed mass media such as cinema, television, photography, and telecommunications? How do new technologies impact artistic production, social life, and individual experience? How have political formations of race, gender, and sexuality shaped technology, and how does technology influence politics?
Lectures and readings will survey the history of several technologies we now consider to be “new media”: computers, video games, the Internet, and digital photography. We will also look backwards, to a time when old media were new: how did historical viewers experience the "new media" of film, television, and radio?
Most histories of technology tend to think of change as progress. New technologies improve upon old. Yet increasingly critics of media and technology express doubt about these narratives of progress. When new technologies emerge to perform new tasks, whose labor gets replaced? As efficiency increases, what expertise gets lost? And what of those who refuse progress: filmmakers who refused the conversion to sound and later to digital formats; printers who fought the computerization of typography; projectionists who work to keep outdated formats alive? In short: As the myth of progress fades, how should we alter our stories about media change?