Information, Media, and Politics: How New is the New Media?
Fall 2019 and Fall 2020
Course Description:
Just before the 2016 presidential election, Wired Magazine claimed that “the role of big data + social data in influencing election decisions cannot be ignored.” In October 2018, Twitter released nine million tweets believed to be from the Russian Internet Research Agency, tweets that often aimed to influence European and American political and social life. The magnitude and ubiquity of “big data” and “social media” is clearly a new phenomenon—but is this novelty just a matter of the size of the problem or does it present a qualitatively different question?
This course invites you to put the new media revolution in historical context. We will explore which problems are distinctly new and which can be fruitfully analyzed as modern versions of age-old philosophical and ethical questions. Questions central to the course include:
How does information spread in a community and to what effect?
How does technology (understood broadly, from the invention of writing to radio to the Web) change social and political communities?
What sources of information do we trust and how do we select them?
And, finally, what is the difference between information, data, and knowledge?
The first part of the semester will center on a historical survey of key approaches to these concerns and their influence in our contemporary debates. We will start with Plato’s critique of writing as a corrupting technology in The Phaedrus and parts of the Republic. We will then consider Renaissance conceptions of the vices and virtues of communication. This first part of the course will culminate in an introductory examination of the first attempt at “information science,” the Encyclopedia and its philosophical foundations, and how it set the stage for our contemporary accounts of the role of information in public life.
In the final unit of the course, students will build on this theoretical background to design and execute a term project focused on a contemporary event, question, or problem. This project will require both a digital component (such as a visualization or a mapping project) as well as a traditional research paper component.