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INFORMATION AND SOCIETY
Dr. Sal Restivo
Hixon/Riggs Professor of Science, Technology and Society
Humanities and Social Sciences
Harvey Mudd College
Parsons 1267
EXT: 77346
OFFICE HOURS: 12-1pm, Mon. & Wed., 12-2 on Tues., and by appointment
STS 179S
Tuesday 2.45-5.30pm, HM-PA 1264
We are not witnessing the flow of information
so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred,
ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office,
home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where
crowds might gather in astonishment.
Don DeLillo(2003), Cosmopolis, 80
The general focus in this course will be on “the information society,” but more specifically it will focus on the very idea of information. While information technologies seem to be ready targets for social criticism and critical analysis in terms of ethics and values, information itself has not been so readily accessible to such tools. The course will deal with information and information technologies as social constructions, and develop this with respect to problems and principles in IT design. The theoretical focus will be on a sociocultural theory of information; the substantive focus will be on social robotics and affective computing.
Information and information technologies are social constructions. Debates about what ITs can and cannot do, whether computer ITs can or can ever think, and the assumed limitations imposed on computer ITs because they cannot be conscious or demonstrate inner affect have proceeded with hardly any attention given to what we know anthropologically and sociologically about consciousness, emotions, and thinking in human beings. If, for example, consciousness, emotions, and thinking are phenomena of social networks, socially constructed, and fundamentally relational, various philosophical and (physical) scientific obstacles to human-like AI and robots become moot. This makes current efforts in social robotics (e.g., Brooks and Breazeal) and affective computing (Picard) especially important for sociologists of mind, brain, thinking, emotions and consciousness.
The principles of design and visual communication are principles of information and communication design. The aesthetics of information technology(ies) has become enmeshed in the discourses of multiculturalism, gender, and alterity. There are four all-encompassing principles of design that need to be incorporated into the visual configuration of any IT's graphic user interface (GUI). They are hierarchy, organization, balance and consistency. These are basic design principles. They are traditional. They are historical. They are aesthetic principles for good design. When they are applied to the design of information and information technologies, they can yield socially compelling visual configurations determined by heightened audience response (read, predicted social response(s) to and gratification with information technologies). The design process is changing into a participatory and user-centered design process partly because there has been acknowledgement and unprecedented recognition of the shift in society to more multicultural representations. The visual design of products is being derived collaboratively with users. In order to establish a common vocabulary for discourse between the user and the interface, a pedagogical infrastructure will have to be implemented as a component of the GUI that will teach users the basic design theories and how they can be practically applied to yield meaningful visual configurations (Sal Restivo and Audrey Bennett, IEEE Proceedings, Rome 2000).
Everywhere, the local is contaminated by the global. In the laboratory, people, resources, and symbols flow in and out along network tracks that reach into every corner of the world [circulation]. The social robots laboratories are crucibles within which we are (through our SRE[social robotics engineering] agents) constructing the new world social order’s image of life, it’s new image of knowledge and science based on a networking logic (cf. Castells, 1998III: 345-378), and its new creation myth. The construction of socially intelligent machines is a mode of reproductive technology. The control and distribution of reproductive knowledges and practices are “contested in every society” (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995: 5). SIRs[socially intelligent robots] research, developments, and applications are already spreading across the information networks of the world, and so globalizing the contestations over modes of reproduction. This SIR information flow thus becomes an important vector for moving science and technology around the world in a multilinear, multicultural dance of dialectical firework[complex circulation]s. The new narrative, the creation myth for the new world order, begins: “In the beginning was INFORMATION…”
Sal Restivo, Collegium Helveticum of the ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 2002.
This course will cover information and information technologies as social constructions, information and design, the global and local circulation of information and information technologies, and ethical and value issues in the information society.
Sample Bibliography (course readings are in bold)
REQUIRED TEXTS.
Carl J. Couch, Information Technologies and Social Order (Aldine de Gruyter, 1996).
Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (Routledge, 1995).
Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information, 2nd ed. (California, 1994).
james Beniger, The Control Revolution (Harvard, 1998).
M. Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Blackwell: 1996).
K. Ducatel, J. Webster, & W. Herrmann (eds.), The Information Society in Europe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
Paul Levinson, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (Routledge, 1997)
Scott Lash, Critique of Information (Sage, 2002).
Brian Martin, Information Liberation (Freedom Press, 1998).
Christopher May, The Information Society: A Skeptical View (Polity, 2002)
R.W. McChesney, E.M. Wood, & J.B. Foster (eds.), Capitalism and the Information Age
(Monthly Review Press, 1998)
J. Rudinow & A. Graybosch, Ethics and Values in the Information Age (Wadsworth, 2002).
Cristine Borgman, From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World (MIT, 2000).
Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko (eds.), The Political Economy of Information (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
James W. Corada (eds.), Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the :Present (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Oscar Gandy, The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Westview Press, 1993).
Joel Rudinow and Anthony Graybosch, Ethics and Values in the Information Age (Wadsworth, 2002).
Christopher May, The Information Society: A Sceptical View (Blackwell, 2002).
He understood how much it meant to him,
the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied
the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns
into play, birdwing and chambered shell. It was
shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and
charts were the cold compression of unruly
human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight
sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets.
In fact data iself wa soulful and glowing, a dynamic
aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence
of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized
in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the
digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s
living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our
bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.
Don DeLillo(2003), Cosmopolis, 24.
There are no newspapers here, no televisions, and above all no computers, which means
no damned Internet. Dugumbe forbids it all. His explanation for this stance is simple,
though no less profound for its simplicity: information, he insists, is not knowledge. The
lessons passed on from one’s elders, taught by the wisest of them but recorded only in the
mind, these, Dugumbe has always said, represent true knowledge. The media I’ve mentioned
can only divert a man from such wisdom and enslave him to what Dugumbe calls the worst of all
devils: confusion. There was a time when I – a man of the West, the possessor of not one but two
doctorates – would have laughed at and disdained such beliefs; and in truth, during the time I’ve been
here the laws and folklore of these people have come to trouble me deeply. Yet in a world stuffed
full of deliberately warped information, of manufactured “truths” that have ignited conflicts far greater
than Dugumbe’s tribal struggles, I now find myself clinging to the core of the old king’s philosophy
even more tightly than he does.
Caleb Carr(2000), Killing Time, 2-3
[“The year is 2023, And information is everywhere: free, flowing,
abundant, instantaneous. But is all – or any – of
But is it accurate?” This is “a techno-terrifying tale of
the information age run amok.”]
With word on the street that computer-encrypted
codes were entirely unbreakable – even by the
all-powerful NSA – the secrets poured in. Drug
lords, terrorists, and embezzlers alike – weary of
having their cellular phone transmissions intercepted-
were turning to the exciting new medium of encrypted
E-mail for instantaneous global communications.
Never again would they have to face a grand jury and
hear phone conversations plucked from the air by an NSA
satellite.
Intelligence gathering had never been easier.
Codes intercepted by the NSA entered TRANSLTR as
totally illegible ciphers and were spit out minutes later as
perfectly readable cleartext. No more secrets.
To make their charade of incompetence complete,
the NSA lobbied fiercely against all new computer encryption
software….The NSA had lost the battle-exactly as it had
planned. The entire electronic global community had been
fooled…or so it seemed.
Dan Brown (1998), Digital Fortress, 22 [“A disturbing,
cutting-edge techno-thriller that should galvanize
everyone who sends or receives e-mail or even
dreams of navigating the web.” J.L. Nance]
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