The Late Age of Print Coming to a Syllabus Near You
August 19th, 2010The Atlantic recently posted C. W. Anderson’s syllabus for his class at CUNY on the history of print culture. Anderson, who is also a a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation, describes the course:
The primary goal of this class is to teach students about the culture of “print media” in an era when that culture is being joined (and in some cases, overtaken) by a culture that we might variously call digital culture, online culture, or the culture of the web. What does “print” mean in our digital age? And what does “culture,” mean, for that matter? By culture I mean something that is not reducible to “economics,” “technology,” “politics,” or “organizations” — although culture emerges out of the nexus of these different factors, and others. In other words, I want to disabuse my students of the notion that new technologies or new economic arrangements can create digital or print culture in the same way that a cue ball hits a billiard ball on a pool table.
One of the books included on his list is Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. Anderson, writes “Striphas does a n
Tags: Syllabus