Digital Ecology

This course seeks to formulate critical questions that are essential to an understanding of American life in the Digital Age. Our inquiries will range from broad sociological problems concerning political culture, globalization, and economic organization to personal questions concerning friendship, intimacy, cognitive styles, modes of perception and feeling, and self-awareness. Much of the content driving the course will focus on the digital world itself: electronic commerce, the blogosphere, virtual community, video gaming, new media, hypermedia, digital devices. However, our abiding objective throughout will be to understand the digital phenomenon as a dimension of American life in general.