REL 314 Complexity: Network Culture (Same as EXPR 314) (Not offered 1999-2000)
As networks and webs spread from the local to the global, a new network culture is emerging. When electronic and telematic reproduction displaces industrial production, social and cultural processes are transformed. How are these new networks to be understood? By what logic or logics do they operate? Tracing notions of systems from nineteenth-century idealism through twentieth-century structuralism and poststructuralism, to contemporary cybernetic and complexity theory, this course will probe the ways in which network culture is changing how we experience the world and interpret "reality." The approach to these questions will be thoroughly interdisciplinary; materials will be drawn from the arts and humanities as well as the social and natural sciences. Authors to be considered include: Hegel, Michel Serres, Douglas Hofstadter, Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze, Ilya Prigogine, Murray Gell-Mann, and Manuel Castells. Requirements: one 20-page paper, participation in online discussion, leading one class session.