Digital Cultures (Course Instructor: Alma Steingart)

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2018
This course examines the history and cultures of digital computing technologies. In the first half of the semester, students will learn to approach computers as artifacts that embed the social orders and cultural practices that produce them. Students explore the history of automation; cybernetics and World War II; the Cold War and the Closed World; artificial intelligence and gendered subjectivity; the growth of the Internet as a military and commercial project. The second half of the course explores how digital computing shapes our contemporary world: topics include big data, surveillance, computer graphics, and video games. Emphasis is placed on how ideas about gender, privacy, and democracy shape labor practices, models of cognition, and material and symbolic practices of networking in an increasingly online world.