About

Course Rationale: This course is based on the premise that New Media—a spectrum of technologies for representation and communication based on the paradigm of computation—represents a once in several century innovation in the representation of knowledge and culture. The goal of the course is to prepare you to participate in this process of innovation by analyzing the emerging genres of New Media and their history.

This class will examine key moments in media history to gain perspective on the nature of the process of technological innovation and cultural change. In this context, we will study the telephone, the camera, and the web, along with more contemporary trends in gaming, mobile services, and social media. In each case, we will use insights and methods from the humanities (i.e., theories of language, communication, and media), the social sciences (addressing questions of policy, sociology, psychology), and media production (drawing on the tools and literature of video production).

You will be working in groups for selected assignments and in-class exercises and be invited to post your work to the course blog, which is intended to be a collaborate space reflective of the investigations we will pursue together in INFO 146.  We will read substantively to understand array of concepts and phenomena associated with New Media, and your understanding of these will be evaluated in discussion, papers, and exams. Periodically, I will also ask you to submit discussion questions addressed to the cluster of readings for an upcoming class session.

The first half of this course will introduce students to foundational efforts to situate new media within society and take inventory of basic analytic concepts for investigating and evaluating new media, including representation, technology, history, and culture. Subsequently, the course will move to somewhat more specialized topics, including questions of policy, contemporary trends, and the recent implications of new media for storytelling.

Required Texts: The New Media Reader, Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin eds.  (MIT, 2003) can be purchased at the bookstore.  Additional readings will be available online and in-class.