The birth and growth of the Internet over the last thirty-five years marks a major turning point in human history. It has few parallels in terms of depth, intensity and speed — as if the end of the dark ages, the era of European exploration, nineteenth-century industrialization, and the birth of modern science were all folded into one and took place in a tenth the time. It transforms who we are as human beings, how we think, how we relate with one another, what drives and motivates us, how we form communities, what passes for knowledge, how we cooperate to alter our world, the  nature of technological change, our relation with the arts, our economic involvements, the opportunities open to us, how politics works and what it is about — and much else. 

In this course we will look at what innovations  are behind some of these some of these changes are. I will offer short handouts in each class, including suggested options for further exploration, and a list of additional readings.

WEEK 1.  What is the Internet? A brief overview. I will go over and explain when necessary  some terms now in common use, such as: e-mail; search engines; listservs; file sharing; open source; cloud computing; mashups; massively multiplayer games; social network sites; blogs; vlogs; Internet radio, YouTube; portals; wikis; SecondLife and Voice-Over-Internet Protocols (VOIP). 

WEEK 2 . A changed reality. If what is real is what we collectively experience and can influence but cannot change just by wishing it, the Internet is an increasingly important part of it. This leads, for instance, to a new kind of economy, that I have termed the Attention Economy (see http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/   ). Unlike earlier great waves of new technologies, such as the steam era or electrification, the Internet itself become a major medium of social interaction leading to further innovation, in an accelerating way.  

WEEK 3. Blogs, listservs and social networks, and how they transform politics and community, with emphasis on the democratizing of both national and international politics, the effects on war and peace and other forms of opinion formation. 

WEEK 4. The new forms of culture and cooperation: meetups, Internet dating, file sharing, mashups, open source, Wikipeida, PloS, new communities including virtual ones such as SecondLife, and new kinds of art 

 WEEK 5. As Walter Ong has emphasized, when literacy become common, the new ways of acquiring knowledge and paying attention changed cognition in a deep way, in effect bring about a new human being. Now we have a new transformation. What I have called Homo interneticus is being born http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_6/goldhaber/index.html; New developments such as social networking and Twitter go even deeper, affecting our emotional and psychological character as well, as Clive Thompson has described http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?scp=1&sq=clive%20Thompson&st=cse 

WEEK 6. Some future possibilities, along with  a summation of pluses and minuses of the Internet. The Internet leads us towards new ways of being human, even though some of that is not necessarily beneficial. How do we weigh the net value?