SOC290

Description

Section information text: This seminar course focuses on the technological, cultural, and economic forces that define our digital lives and times. It will examine both established and emergent trends in the worlds of technology, science and ideas that give us clues about the future. A section of the course will examine how technical expertise developed historically and remains significant in the making of things, objects, and new knowledge. All these forces have defined scientific and technological enterprise, as much as in the past as in contemporary times. The course will examine how new technologies and the digital world have catalyzed global communication positively to create fluid conduits of communication and exchange, At the same time, the negative consequences of this liquidity has led to hyper surveillance, the hijacking of attention, and to new forms of intrusive capitalism. Questions such as how the old is so present in the new both in endurance of circuits of power and in technological world will be interrogated. How can students be smart about understanding the durability of old structures in new ones. This fulfills the Sociology capstone requirement