How Computers Became Media

Course Description

Charting a history from when computers were human (and more precisely, women, as Jennifer Light has shown) to our present moment when AI has taken on much of what was once seen as the sole province of the human, this course considers the development of computers as tools of communication, cooperation, creativity, and play. It follows a story of how machines once designed for numerical calculation became media. It relatedly covers how the technologies of twentieth-century media fed into computers: how camera lenses came to be used for silicon electronics, how television screens became computer monitors, how the fundamentals of radio opened up to cellular data. Course materials will be drawn broadly from media theory, the history of technology, game studies, literature, films, music albums, and dead and living hardware and software. Central questions will include how computers extended the capabilities of legacy media, as in electronic music, digital film production, and online publishing; how they outmoded or threatened traditional formats, as can be seen with the dwindling of magazine racks and the end-of-cinema debates; and how they enabled entirely novel technologies, from the word processor to the graphical user interface. Assignments will involve applying media-theoretical concepts to objects of computer history: a short traditional research paper and a 3–5 minute video essay (no experience required; all instruction and tools provided in class).

Code

AS.061.362

Credits

3

Subject

Film and Media Studies