From James Marsh to Computers in Backpacks: Romanticism in the 21st Century
THURS. OCTOBER 27, 2011 :::: 4:00 - 5:30 PM :::: MUB THEATER II
Speaker: Thomas Streeter
Professor of Sciology, University of Vermont
& author of The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet
From James Marsh to Computers in Backpacks: Romanticism in the 21st Century
Beginning in the 1960s an increasing number of engineers and policymakers began to reinterpret the act of computing, not as calculation or prediction, but as a form of expression, exploration, or art, to see themselves as artist, rebel, or both, and to find communities with similar experiences that would reinforce that view. People need to express themselves, they said, people want and need spontaneity, creativity, and dragon-slaying heroism. Direct, unplanned interaction with computers offered an enticing and safely limited unpredictability that would fulfill those goals. That is why we need small computers instead of mainframes, the argument went, why we need personal computers instead of dedicated word processors, why we need the open, end-to-end distributed networking of the internet instead of proprietary corporate systems, why we should invest in 1990s dotcoms, why we need open source software. These discursive habits, Streeter argues, had consequences: for example, the 1990s dotcom stock bubble owes much to the linkage of romantic tropes to networked computing. His book The Net Effect demonstrates how the creation of a technology is shot through with profoundly cultural forces – with the deep weight of the remembered past, and the pressures of shared passions made articulate.
This event is free and open to the public.
Coffee and refreshments will be available beginning 3:45 PM.
::: Sic'em Sponsored! :::
More about Thomas Streeter
Thomas Streeter has been a faculty member of the Sociology Department of the University of Vermont since 1989. He has an undergraduate degree in Semiotics from Brown University and a PhD in Communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also taught for the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, and for the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science, Princeton, NJ, in 2000-2001.
The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (NYU Press, 2010) is a study of the role of culture in the social construction of internet technology. His award-winning Selling the Air, a study of the cultural underpinnings of the creation of the US broadcast industry and its regulatory apparatus, was published in 1996. He edited, with Zephyr Teachout, a volume about the use of the internet in Howard Dean's run for President, called Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope, published in 2007. He has published articles and chapters in outlets ranging from the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal to the Journal of Communication to Critical Inquiry.
Visit Thomas Streeter's website
Co-sponsored by:
UNH Center for the Humanities
UNH Humanities Program
UNH Center for New England Culture
UNH Department of Sociology
UNH Department of Communication
UNH Department of English
Comm-entary Undergraduate Journal of Communication