REVOLUTIONS IN TEXT AND TECHNOLOGY

New media is nothing new. New media historians trace rich record of the moments when some new textual technology entered the public sphere and provoked responses ranging from widespread anxiety and to revolutionary fervor. We will examine the cultural anxieties that attend new media, stretching from Plato’s Phaedrus—where Socrates warns that the advent of writing will destroy people’s memories—to today, when Nicholas Carr asks “Is Google making us stupid?” The clay tablet, the codex, the printing press, the chalkboard, the telegraph, the typewriter, the pdf, computer coding, and the smart phone have each promised to revolutionize the reading and writing publics, access to power, and even how people think.

This course examines those promises within their historical contexts, through critical study, and using hands-on experiences. For instance, we will study the role of clay tablets in upholding ancient empires at the same time that we craft our own clay tablet texts. We will take notes with ink pens while we study the role of Medieval scribes in spreading Christianity and Islam. We will create ‘zines while studying the Riot Grrl movement. And we will create our own html hypertexts (no prior coding experience required) as we read the earliest hypertext fiction. These hands-on experiences move arguments about the dangers and revelations of writing technologies out of the realm of the hypothetical and into the realm of the experiential.

The class will visit Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) and Barnard’s Zine Archive, where we will look at textual artifacts, from ancient papyri to early print and digital texts. Our approach will prepare you to situate the contemporary textual technologies you take for granted (IMs, Twitter, Google Docs, and so on) within the long history of new media. And it will teach those pursuing literary studies, new media studies, and computer science research methods required to examine a text as a technology.