Cyberculture @ Berkeley on iTunes U
Readers of Hawk Wings will know that I have an interest in philosophy and culture of the Internet, in the impact of email and the web on our conceptions of the world and ourselves, and all the other things that get posted here in the “email in general” category.
The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry 
by Gordon Graham, Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, is a favourite.
So, I was excited to see a course in the newly-launched Berkeley at iTunes U on the “Foundations of American Cyberculture”.
Then I read the course description:
This new course will enable students to think critically about, and engage in practical experiments in, the complex interactions between new media and perceptions and performances of embodiment, agency, citizenship, collective action, individual identity, time and spatiality. We will pay particular attention to the categories of personhood that make up the UC Berkeley American Cultures rubric (race and ethnicity), as well as to gender, nation, and disability. The argument threading through the course will be the ways in which new media both reinforce pre-existing social hierarchies, and yet offer possibilities for the transcendence of those very categories. The new media — and we will leave the precise definition of the new media as something to be argued about over the course of the semester — can be yet another means for dividing and disenfranchising, and can be the conduit of violence and transnational dominance.
Berkeley. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
[Via TUAW ]
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