What is information? Is it something private, immaterial,
and abstract—something we carry about in our
minds, or in our brains—or is it something public, material, and social? And
what is the role of documents in thinking about
what information might be—whether they come in the form of printed texts, or
electronically, such as email messages and web pages, or in the form of films, television
broadcasts, telephone messages—or in their many other manifestations?
This
course examines these questions, with special attention to the materiality of
information, and the various social arrangements that have to be in place for
information to emerge at all. My approach derives from a research field I call
the social
studies of information. The main theme of the course might be called—to
borrow the title of a recent book—the
social life of information.
