HIST1900C: The History of the Internet
Winter 2023
Instructor: Professor Shawn Graham
The ‘history of the internet’ is more than the history of a particular package of technologies. It’s a story about power, people, culture, and materials. The ‘internet’ isn’t a thing, it’s a place and since time and space are unified, it’s an age. What is an appropriate frame to study the internet, and once we’ve decided on that, what might we see? I’m not sure where this will take us – but wherever we go, the journey will change how you think about the world.
HIST1900c is a hands-on lecture based class. By ‘hands on’ I mean you will in fact build things in this class. I will lecture to set the scene. What happens next is up to you.
While this may change, my intention is to organize the course so that it is divided into three parts, with three interstitial weeks where we build things. Mondays are generally days where I set the scene. Wednesdays require your active presence & participation as we try things – or I might lecture some more.
Module 1: The Pre-history of the ‘net
Module 2: The Pre-history of computing
Module 3: Machines that talk to one another
Do I have to be techy to get anything out of this course?
In a word, no! You do have to be willing to be comfortable with experimentation, with things that break, and with asking for help from your peers or from the prof.
Academic Goals:
- Familiarity with some different frameworks for studying this history
- Contextualized understanding of technical/scientific advances in their cultural milieu
- Ways of studying this material that take advantages of the affordances of networked ways-of-thinking