HIST 2909 Media Revolutions: From Scroll to Screen

This course surveys the history of media from the ancient world to the present. It starts with the invention of alphabetic script in antiquity and examines how the material forms and supports of writing changed over the next two millennia-from papyri scrolls to the manuscript codex of the Middle Ages, to the printed book and primitive newspapers of the age of Gutenberg. It then considers the increasingly diversified media landscapes of the 19th and 20th centuries. This was an era in which a series of rapid technological breakthroughs-telegraphy, photography, film, wireless radio broadcasting, and television-dramatically altered, and ultimately reduced, the significance of print. Finally, we’ll turn our attention to the media revolutions of our own age: the advent of the Internet, Google Search, social media, and most recently, AI. Several recurrent questions will frame our survey of media landscapes: How, to what ends, and in what institutional settings are particular media used? How do they affect modes of thinking? And what are the relations of different media to the various historical forms of religious, political, and economic power?

Credits

3