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"Early in the next millennium your right and left cuff links or earrings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites, and have more computing power than your present PC. Mass Media will be refined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized information and entertainment. Schools will change to become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble ideas and socialize with children from around the world. The digital planet will look and feel like the head of a pin." Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (1995)
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This interdisciplinary graduate seminar explores contemporary theory and research concerned with community, agency and identity, access to and engagement with new technologies, initiatives to address and ameliorate inequalities, possibilities for social justice and civic engagement, and conditions for the design, production and marketing of networked technologies and locations. The readings will pertain to a diverse multitude of pedagogical environments, including libraries, chat rooms, activist sites (e.g., moveon.org, witness.org), community development projects (e.g., Vancouver Community Network), schools, blogs, Internet cafes, and relatedly, the retooling of performances of self, identity and technological competencies.
Seminars will focus on current topics, such as community informatics, critical theory, blogging, mobility and space, globalization, online communities, performance theory, feminist technology assessment, postmodernisms, minority uses of the Net, e-zines, and cyberculture.
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The last decade has witnessed a significant proliferation of new technologies and information networks. It is commonplace to invoke the binary notion that a "digital divide" separates technological haves and have-nots. However, it is clear that a more complex and multi-faceted relationship prevails between various aspects of digital engagement, such as access to new technologies, connectivity, authoring of content, use of new tools for e-commerce, tracking and monitoring, and elements of social privilege. Conceptions of identity and notions of technological competence, as well as access to digital tools, are co-constructed and inter-dependent. Important indicators of inequality extend both to formal and informal educational environments, as well as to the workplace and community locales. From a community informatics perspective it is important to pay attention to convivialities and to gaps between local demographics and participation in creating, not just accessing, online resources and communities. To the degree that educational opportunities are made available in e-environments, the social cultural and political significance of networked digital media increases concomitantly.
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