Computing the Self: The Art and Philosophy of Digital Culture

What does it feel like to live in data? To be tagged, tracked, followed, favorited, or rated? How has the datafication of everyday life shaped your social life, or altered the way you relate to yourself and others? Students in this class will ask what it means to see and be seen as a data object. To do so, you will analyze a variety of novels, stories, works of philosophy, psychology, and social science that have dramatized the questions posed above. The class will focus on several twenty-first-century novels and essays, with occasional forays back into the early twentieth century. You will pay special attention to the ways writers and artists use aesthetic and essayistic forms to think through, and intervene in, everyday life. Students in this course will practice writing and thinking in an academic style. Along the way, you will also learn to see art, fiction, social theory, and philosophy as tools to think with, rather than as inert representations or static arguments.

The Art of Memory

How do we remember, and forget, in the age of Instagram? Has life become like a Black Mirror episode, where everything we do, say, and think is recorded and stored for future reference? In the twenty-first century, our computers memorize information for us, and about us: the entire archive of human knowledge has been uploaded to the cloud, where it can be searched, re-arranged, sorted, and harnessed to suit any conceivable need. We leave permanent traces of ourselves every time we log on to Facebook, check our bank accounts, or buy books on Amazon. In this course, we will consider literary and philosophical perspectives on the nature of memory, from Plato all the way to Black Mirror. We will approach the question of memory through multiple frameworks: political, historical, technological, and personal. Along the way, we will read fiction and watch films by Jorge Luis Borges, Octavia Butler, Marcel Proust, and others. We’ll also consider the legal and political implications of memory in the modern age, looking closely at social media and new laws about the right to be forgotten. For centuries, humans aimed to be remembered by their peers and successors. Today, we ask for the right to be forgotten. What’s changed?

Anxiety and Technology

We are often told that we are living in a world increasingly defined by, and dependent on, technology. For some, the proliferation of machines is undoubtedly positive development: technical innovation from iPhone apps to medical miracles make our work-lives more efficient, our desires more attainable, and our personal lives more convenient. But just as often, our gadgets are regarded as the cause of social, ecological, and psychological ills. Some people argue that, rather than free us from necessity, technological advancement has made human beings mere ‘appendages’ to their machines (as Karl Marx wrote in the 19th century). Even today, one doesn’t have to look far to find popular narratives about social atomization in the age of the smartphone. How are we to understand these two diverging perspectives on technological change, one utopian and positive, the other profoundly dystopian? In this course, we will place current ideas about technology in historical context, considering how thinkers of all sorts (including philosophers, artists, novelists, and filmmakers) have thought about the evolving relationship between human beings and technical machinery since the advent of writing in the 3rd millennium B.C. It turns out that anxiety about technology is nothing new--in fact, ambivalence about technological change is one of the most ancient human concerns.