The History and Politics of Information  — LIBR 569B Cross-listed with ENGL 561B, Fall 2021

We understand ourselves to be living in the Age of Information. How do scholars, activists, and artists understand the nature of the “revolution” that brought this Age into being? How has it reconstituted subjectivity, society, economics, and geopolitics? What changes has this brought to the arts, humanities, and culture? Examining the rise of digital information and its consequences, we ask whether the information revolution has drawn historical patterns of inequality (including race, gender, Orientalism, and post-colonial geopolitics) into new political configurations. This course is an introduction to the transnational politics of information. We pursue a long historical view, a global political perspective, and a cultural analysis.

These are some of the texts we are likely to engage with:

1. Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity, 2019.
2. Brock, André L. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. 2020. NYU Press.
3. Broussard, Meredith Artificial Unintelligence, 2018
4. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong 2021. Discriminating data: correlation, neighborhoods, and the new politics of recognition.
5. Crawford, Kate. 2021. Atlas of AI: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence.
6. Hicks, Mar. 2018. Programmed inequality: how Britain discarded women technologists and lost its edge in computing. MIT Press
7. Irani, Lilly. Chasing Innovation. Princeton University Press, 2019
8. McIlwain, Charlton D. Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice from the Afronet to Black Lives Matter, Oxford University Press, 2020.
9. Mullaney, Thomas S., Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip. 2021. Your computer is on fire. MIT Press
10. O’Neil, Cathy. 2017. Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Great Britain: Penguin Books.
11. Oldenziel, Ruth. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014
12. Roberts, Sarah T. Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
13. Turner, Fred. 2015. The democratic surround: multimedia and American liberalism from World War II to the psychedelic sixties. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press