Course Credits (3)
Never has so much information been available so quickly to so many. In just a few decades, broadband infrastructures, advances in data processing, and smartphones have come to connect people, ideas, institutions, and things at unprecedented speed and scale. This condition that sociologist Rogers Brubaker has “hyperconnectivity” will only intensify in the years to come, as firms compete for generative A.I. consumers and race to develop autonomous A.I. agents and quantum computing. What promise and peril do these tools hold? How might they challenge or entrench existing inequalities of power and resources? This course is for students drawn both to creative and social scientific approaches to comprehend the tech-driven changes that are rapidly transforming our possibilities for self-understanding, communication, work, and political action. Engaging with peer-reviewed scholarly research as well as speculative literature and films, we will examine established trends along with theoretical propositions for the effects of hyperconnectivity on our institutions and everyday lives. Social scientific readings will include article-length studies and selections from Brubaker’s Hyperconnectivity & Its Discontents, Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job, Sarah Brayne’s Predict & Surveil, and Forrest Stuart’s Ballad of the Bullet. Speculative works will include M.T. Anderson’s Feed, Spike Jonze’s Her, Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead, and short fiction by George Saunders and Ted Chiang. These studies and stories will help us explore questions such as: How do our current fears and excitement over hyperconnectivity compare with past reactions to new technologies? What are the potential impacts of enabling for-profit firms to digitally mediate everything from our most private moments to our interactions with broader society? Does access to more information and bigger audiences reduce injustice as practiced by biased organizations and experienced by marginalized communities? How might AI, big data, and automation technologies strengthen, impede, or replace interpersonal relationships? The major writing assignments for the course will require students to investigate questions raised by readings and class discussions by collecting and analyzing qualitative data commonly used in social scientific research. They will submit their findings in the style of brief research articles, with reports on their findings prefaced by synthesized discussion of class texts.
About Professor Hwang
Professor Karam Hwang studied English as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, earned a Masters in Library and Information Sciences from UIUC, and worked in public library teen services for four years before completing a PhD in Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill. Her professional and educational background expresses her interest in a range of approaches to understanding society, including humanistic, practical, and social scientific.