What are the details of our daily existence? What systems dominate our lives? What meanings can we make of our situation?

This social studies/humanities course will steal from various disciplines - including anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, economics, futurology, history, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology - to help us make sense of our situation.

A major goal of the course will be to focus your attention on your own life. Together we will investigate major systems that create and rule our lives including capitalism, school, family, popular culture, and the US government. And we will figure out how to interpret our lives, and these systems, and the collision of our lives and these systems.

We will detour into the future and the past but our journey will be primarily contemporary.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

More resources for HW 21

"The Machine Stops" - Melodramatic and moving sci-fi story from 1909! that predicts much of our current situation. You could rip this off, condense it, twist it, retell it, and your new version might also be worthwhile. (My favorite part is the "I get no ideas" line, this restless pursuit of new entertaining concepts that animates so much websurfing from blogs to wikipedia. It would be worth deconstructing this binary opposition (ideas vs. sensual experience) which seems to permeate as far back as Plato's Cave, at least.)

There's another story a lot like this from around the 1920s that I read when I was 11ish - with wheelchairs and the hero is scorned because he has the genetic deformity of functioning legs, but guess who laughs last? But I can't find it online.

I'll add more resources to this Friday and on the weekend. For now, let me repeat my advice from today - the time to say, "Hmmmm, what shall I do?" has passed. Its time to make an art project that expresses or challenges or celebrates or reveals some aspect of how digital representations of reality have affected our lives and our situations. If you don't know what to do, then make a poem or a drawing.

Remember you have to post your art project (or a digital representation of it, which is just as good, right?) online by Monday 8:30am.

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