Digital Culture: Visions and Legacies

The course is based on expanding on the basic insights of Marshall McLuhan as they have been laid out in ten predictions listed in his collaboration with Bruce Powers on a book published under the title, The Global Village in 1989. The predictions have all been proven correct today, but the value of the course is to estimate what technologies are operating today as extensions of these predictions. The intention is to provide an overview of today’s most critical technological and cultural issues as well as trying to make students understand and know McLuhan’s work. Each lecture takes one of the predictions and tries to explain what is relevant about them and see where it is leading us. It is expected that the course will sustain a larger perspective and offer students the opportunity to find teir place and their interests within that spectrum.