STSC1600 - The Information Age

We are said to live in an “information age.” Information technologies have been credited with ushering in an era of unprecedented information creation, collection, storage, and communication. We experience the impact of this firsthand: these technologies increasingly pervade our homes, our workplaces, our schools, our most private spaces. But what exactly do we mean when we speak of the information age? When and how did it come into being? What developments—social, economic, political, or technological—made the digital world possible? How do these fit in the longer history of technology and society? And how is all this different from earlier eras? In this course, we explore these questions by looking to the history of information, information technologies, and information sciences, a history that long predates the digital computer. Although, at the center of our story will be the development of new information technologies—from the printing press and the telegraph to the computer and of course the Internet—our focus will not primarily be on machines, but on people and how individuals conceptualized, contributed to, made sense of, and dealt with the many transformational changes that have shaped the contours of our modern digital world. We will explore forms of identity, knowledge, and community that have emerged within this information age. Our goal will be to deepen historical perspectives and build analytical tools to critically evaluate the role of information in our increasingly digital world today.