Overviefw

Overview
//"Th[e] shift from print to the computer does not mean the end of literacy. What will be lost is not literacy itself, but the literacy of print, for electronic technology offers us a new kind of book and new ways to write and read."//

--Jay David Bolter, //Writing Spaces//

What effect has the electronic revolution in communication had upon the nature of discourse at the beginning of the 21st century? These new media--hypermedia, email, the World Wide Web, blogs, wikis, powerpoints, YouTube, Facebook--are radically changing the nature of human discourse, building upon and in many ways superseding print-based media. The effects on communication, cognition, and education promise to be at once exciting and disruptive.

There are two underlying assumptions to this course: first, "new media," the discourse forms enabled by computers and networks, are becoming more social and less static. If the model for the old discourse was the lone writer toiling away in an attic somewhere, the model of the new electronic discourses is the "prosumer," the producer and consumer of media rolled into one, a cell phone at the ear, IM and blog and Facebook all open at once on the computer screen, acting and reacting, writing and reading at once, connected to the world electronically in multiple ways.

And second, with very rare exceptions, throughout the history of Homo Sapiens, communication media don't become extinct; they just lose part of their niche in the communication ecology. We are interested in the niche that each of the new media fills in our communication universe, and what it has displaced.