Fall, Winter/Coordinated Study

Faculty: Thad Curtz, Ju-Pong Lin, David Paulsen, Rachel Scherr

Enrollment: 84

Prerequisites: None

Faculty Signature: No

Special Expenses: Up to $40 for field trips and performances.

Internship Possibilities: No

Travel Component: None

All sorts of people are getting on the Internet—government officials and cyberpunks, Nigerians and Australians, school kids and scientists. The news is full of pronouncements about cyberspace and the information revolution; some of them claim that earlier changes in communications led to profound transformations of consciousness, politics, education and social life, and that we’re in the midst of another one. Do you think that moving from a world in which everything has to be spoken and remembered to one in which people write things down makes a big difference in how people learn? How about going from scribes’ manuscripts to printed books? Do you think photography, film, television and video are changing how you think and feel and act? For better or for worse . . .? Will the rapidly unfolding conversion of words and images to digital versions flowing around the planet at electronic speeds make much difference in people’s experiences and the course of history?

This program explores questions such as these, drawing on the faculty’s backgrounds in philosophy and cognitive science, video and installation art, and literature. Our central focus will be on developing our capacity to respond to, describe and share the ways in which different sorts of representations express, convey and shape experiences. Since the communication of experience through representations of various kinds is a central part of education, we’ll be interested throughout the program in how changes in technologies for representation have affected the ways people got educated in the past, and what current and past changes in such technologies might suggest about how we should be getting educated now. A lot of our work will involve careful reading, writing and discussion; we will also spend time learning to use computers and media equipment, doing studio assignments using video equipment, and working in the computer labs.

We’ll begin by looking at the history of several sorts of representation: writing, images, and the visual display of quantitative information. Then we’ll focus on some case studies:the shifting relations between orality and literacy in the time of Socrates, in colonialism and today; the creation of "realistic" representation in painting and literature and its ongoing destruction in this century; and the effects of modern media from the telegraph to contemporary electronic art and proliferating Web technologies. We’ll study theoretical and historical works such as Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Plato’s dialogues as well as contemporary material, art as well as theory. One way and another, we will keep circling around our central questions. Speech, writing, print, visual images, cyberspace: how do the means that we have available for communicating shape what we experience, if they do?

What effects have the changes in them had on education, and should the ways in which they’re shifting now change how we’re educating ourselves, or not?

Credit awarded in art history, cognitive science, communications theory, expository writing, history, literature and media production.

Total: 16 credits each quarter.

Program is preparatory for careers and future studies in any discipline that centers on interpretation, including literature, communications, linguistics, education, psychology, journalism, philosophy, cognitive science, history, anthropology, art history or law, as well as for further work in media or multimedia.