This seminar divides roughly into four interlocking parts. To provide a context within which to frame and discuss historical and cultural issues attending to the current uses of information technologies the first section begins with Castells’ sweeping study of network societies followed Feenberg’s synthesis of philosophy, history and social thought. We will then study three seminal texts by Winner, Ellul and McLuhan that collectively theorize the historical contexts and potential social and political outcomes of the deployment information machines. Having gained some grasp of the social contexts regulating and promoting information technologies, along with some knowledge of earlier theories of media and technology, we then read Jordan, Robins and Webster, and Barney for their contemporary critiques of information machines and new media. Finally, looking at Hillis, Shields, and Andrejevic, the seminar probes the meanings and importance of “the virtual” and virtual technologies. We will examine how these technologies and the processes of which they form a part, participate in redefining what we mean by culture, the body, identity, politics and space. Readings span disciplinary, methodological and ideological approaches, and the objects that organize each book vary from the political economy of new media, to the relationships between bodies and technologies, to the philosophical and historical connections between earlier ways of conceiving identity and political formations and how these are reconfigured at a time of the “rise of the network society.” This approach should help facilitate making connections, for example, between the exterior world of “real nature,” and social relations, and the equally “real” interior experience combining fantasies of disembodiment and control, desire, perception, and the imaginary, all of which operate across increasingly leaky boundaries intended to hold separate self/other, real/illusion, local/global, interior/exterior, private/public, us/them and politics/economics. Because the readings range from social science/empirical approaches to cultural studies and philosophical, literary and historical enquiries, the course encourages dialogue across disciplines, methods, and discursive approaches. “History, Theory, Technology” aims to foster critical insight into the relationships among older and new theories of media; politics and philosophy; and identity, technology and social space.

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