Course description

Page 2

601A WURSTER

Instructor:Professor Yehuda E. Kalay

Units:4

Place:601 Wurster

Time:Thursdays, 2-5pm

Format:Seminar

The course is open to students from all departments

The term New Media has received many different interpretations over the past few years, ranging from technical to artistic to cultural. One interpretation considers “New Media” any process of mediated communication that has the potential to change various aspects of human culture and experience in some radical way. As such, the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, the invention of architectural scale drawings in 15th century Italy, the invention of the Morse Code and transmitter in 1832, and of photography at the 19th century, can be considered examples of “old” New Media, each of which has had a profound impact on many aspects of human life and culture.

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin,in their book Remediation (MIT Press, 2000), suggest that the “new” in New Media is a process, rather than an adjective: theprocess of refashioning, or“remediation,”which occurs when some new technology supplants, or supplements, an older medium, with new affordances, new potentials, and new limitations.Thus photography remediated painting; film remediated stage production; television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio; the world wide web is remediating other forms of telecommunication; and cell phones remediate interpersonal communication, on many levels.

More fundamentally, mediationcan be considered any process that defines the relationship of human beings to their environment, to other human beings, and tothemselves. It is a process that has its origins in the rise of civilization itself, and that has relied ever more heavily on technology.

The digital information processing revolution, which started in the mid-20th century, has already had profound effects on our culture, our perceptions, our environment, and our very being. Email, cell phones, the Internet, instant messaging, digital photography, digital cinema, computer-generated animation, computer games, computer-aided design, and the contradictory and much-debated concept of “virtual reality” are all products of ubiquitous digital information processing that affect many aspects of human knowledge, culture, and experience. They have put the means to produce, disseminate, and consume vast quantities of information at the fingertips of every citizen, anywhere, anytime. Like the new media of the past, today’s New Media are reshaping individuals and societies in ways we have barely begun to understand. They have the power to democratize the flow of information, promote civic participation, freedom of expression, social equality, cultural literacy, and global awareness. But they also present enormous challenges for our culture, our society, and our very conceptions of ourselves. What happens to governments and communities when our daily activities are mediated by electronic networks? What happens to human bodies and material existence when virtual environments, robotic prostheses, and chip-based implants become an integral part of our experience? What happens to privacy when heightened levels of surveillance become not only technically possible but mandated by the state or controlled by private interests? What happens to the concept of the human when artificial intelligence begins to redefine sentience, virtual places substitute for physical environments, and telepresence replaces human touch?

It is not surprising, therefore, that the impacts of new media have become a subject of study in many disciplines, which try to assess critically their affordances and implications.Many of these discussions, however, are confined within disciplinary boundaries, oblivious to similar discussions in other disciplines. Consequently, assigning labels like ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘harmful’ or ‘beneficial’ are couched in particular normative vocabularies, value systems, and disciplinary expectations. Moreover, in failing to study the conditions that enable the invention, production, and distribution of new media, humanists and engineers alike tend to universalize their accounts of a medium’s benefits and drawbacks, despite historical and ethnographic evidence that the same medium can be used and valued differently in different times and places. Similarly, different disciplines may lack a certain self-reflexiveness about their medium.The humanities, for example, tend to make use of New Media technologies, like text and image processing, without really investigating them critically as objects of study in and of themselves. Indeed, some humanists view New Media as inimical to the arts and humanities, which tend to assume the singularity and irreplaceability of the world and the uniqueness of each human being. Technologists often reply that computation has the potential to facilitate human creativity, enabling new modes of aesthetic expression or social communication. Yet, they often develop New Media technologies with little regard for the history and complexity of human experience. Similarly, artists and designers make New Media creations of many kinds, but often without full awareness of their historical and humanistic implications. As a result, neither humanists nor technologists (nor artists and designers) have a full understanding of the theory, history, and practice needed to productively study and shape New Media. Instead, they often projectabstractly utopian or dystopian perspectives—on one hand that new computational technologies will improve our lives and the world, on the other hand that they are a fad, a high-tech bubble, or a technological juggernaut threatening our very humanity.

To formulate a coherent and comprehensive research agenda that can interrogate and move forward the discourse in New Media, I suggest thatneither projection is fitting or productive. New Media, by their very nature, cut across modalities and academic disciplines. Hence, a critical understanding of their nature and impact necessarily requires an interdisciplinary approach. To gain a more generalized view of the affordances and impacts of new media on culture, social relations, values, institutions, and everyday life, a multi-disciplinary approach is needed.

This course examines fundamental questions leading to the formulation of a research agenda in New Media, by studying the subject matter from the following points of view:

  • Humanities, to probe the motivations for developing new media and interrogate the ways in which new media affect the human condition.
  • Technologies, to engage with and study the innovation, production and dissemination of new media.
  • Arts and Design, to explore the aesthetic and performative limits at which humans interact with new media.
  • Social sciences, to explore the impacts of new media on the formation of new types of social networks and learning habits.

This seminar explores what New Media means in the first place, what kinds of questions does it raise and tries to answer, where do these questions come from, how are they framed, articulated, argued, presented, and defended, and what they mean for established practices, ways of thinking, the economy, culture, society, knowledge, and other areas of our lives.

The seminar does not focus on any one research topic, nor any one point of view. Rather, it will try to explore the issues raised by New Media as they pertain to many different research topics, drawing on the students’ own knowledge, acquired in their home academic disciplines, and seminal texts in the area of New Media.

As such, the course is organized as follows:

  • A set of topics to be researched and presented by the students, using suggested and other readings.
  • A set of questions leading each student to formulating a research agenda in New Media.

The course will consist of readings, writing exercises, discussions, and presentations.