Much of the contemporary literature dealing with information technologies, new media, and digital culture either overlook or oversimplify the complexity of technology as a social phenomenon. It is often remarkably ahistorical as well, as if the examination of communication technologies began alongside the arrival of the Web. For those of us who deal with information and communication technologies in our own work, the various demands of our research projects rarely allow us the chance to revisit the traditions that produced these areas of study. This semester we aim to rectify that. This reading course will explore some of the foundational works in Sociology and Communication that aim to understand the relationship between technology and society. We will generally read one scholar per week, in order to read them deeply. In our meetings we will discuss the readings on their own, and then try to identify what they might offer to the current literature on new technology and society. The outcome will certainly be a better understanding of this area, and a rich set of theoretical tools we can each bring to our own research.

Week one: Aug 28
   C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination: excerpt from introduction [1959]
   Martin Heidegger "The Question Concerning Technology" [1977]
   Carl Mitcham, "Types of Technology" Research in Philosophy & Technology v1 [1978]
   Leo Marx, "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept" Social Research 64.3 [1997]

Week two: Sept 4
   Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology [1925/1978]: 3-62
   Max Weber, Essays in Economic Sociology [1924/1999] (Richard Swedberg, ed.) 41-115, 155-178
   Max Weber, "The Bureaucratic Machine"

Week three: Sept 11
   John Dewey, The Public and its Problems [1927]: 1-184
   John Dewey, "What I Believe," in Collected Works

Week four: Sept 18
   Karl Marx, "Ch 1: Commodities" and "Ch 15: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry" in Capital, Vol. One [1867] (125-177, 492-587)
   Igor Kopytoff, "The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process" in Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things [1986]: 64-94

Week five: Sept 25
   Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization [1934]: 3-106, 321-446 [available as e-book]

Week six: Oct 2
   Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society [1954/1964]: 3-22, 64-162, 319-343, 412-436
   Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor [1986] 3-120

Oct 9 - Fall Break...

Week seven: Oct 16
   Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society [1984] xiii-xxxvii, 1-40, 162-280

Week eight: Oct 23
   Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication [1951]: 3-142, 156-198
   Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media [1961]: 3-61

Week nine: Oct 30
   Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form [1974]: 1-157 (all)

Week ten: Nov 6
   James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society [1982]: 13-36, 113-230

Week eleven: Nov 13
   James Beniger, The Control Revolution [1986]: 1-30, 291-438 [available as e-book]
   Michel Foucault, "Panopticism" in Discipline and Punish [1977]: 195-217

Week twelve: Nov 20 [Thanksgiving]
   Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New [1988]: 1-231 (all)

Week thirteen: Nov 27
   Judy Wacjman, Feminism Confronts Technology [1991]: 1-167 (all)

Week fourteen: Dec 4 [note: after classes end]
   Thomas Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture [2004]: 1-174 (all)

Books are on being put on non-circulating reserve in Olin 401. I will circulate copies of Dewey's essay.

Assignment: If you are taking this course for a grade, there will be a writing assignment due at the end of the undergraduate exam week; you may either write about your own research, in a way that grapples with or benefits from some of the work and thinking we encounter here; or you may write a paper that focuses on one scholar from this list and discusses the value of their work for the contemporary study of information technology. If you are taking this course pass/fail, no writing will be required.