Graduate Seminar on Comm Tech

This seminar addresses accounts and theorists of communication technologies as systems. Its focus is on influential books investigating entire systems of communication from competing theoretical perspectives. Its purpose is to develop an understanding of how the social sciences reason about systems of communication technology and humanity.

The authors covered here address a wide range of concerns, including: How is the Internet situated in the normal experiences of users? How does digital convergence complicate national sovereignty? How did the telephone alter the conditions of modernity? However, in addition to these questions, our broader aim is to compare and contrast the construction of scholarly arguments incorporating technological systems, with an emphasis on the development of these systems.

The seminar covers a range of intellectual traditions and disciplines, with some emphasis on science and technology studies and the history of technology. Other perspectives and approaches include ethnography, "new" institutionalism, political economy, and cultural studies. This seminar is intended to be useful for students interested in the study of media and communication generally or of technology generally.

The seminar is organized around competing theoretical concerns, assumptions, and approaches. Work by the authors covered includes four accounts of particular technologies: radio, television, the telephone, and the Internet. It also includes four accounts that make arguments across communication technologies and/or across history, often dealing with digital convergence and the Internet.

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