Proposal for a University Scholars course, Winter/Spring 2000
Hugh Blackmer, Science Librarian

The Machine and The Garden:
history and prospects of humanity computing

How did computers become entwined in every aspect of our lives? What can we expect in the next 20 years of the evolution of silicon-based life forms? This course will use classic texts, syntheses, predictions, critiques, fictional extrapolations and videos to explore technological history, scientific and social implications, philosophical issues and utopian visions of the computer. Students will undertake research projects which will be presented as web pages.

Among the texts and stimulus materials:

I have been thinking about the possible dimensions and contents of this course as I taught University Scholars 203 (Technology and American Frontiers: an exploration of resources) in Winter 1999. A running log of ruminations, links and materials tells this tale chronologically, but it may be more useful to extract (below) a few of the essentials to indicate resources and proposed directions for the course.

The basic problem which prompts me to offer this course is that the computer is the central enabling technology of our time, relevant to the work and future prospects of all disciplines and all of our students, taken for granted as a desktop tool by scholars everywhere, approaching ubiquity in schools and libraries, an important appliance in many households, but the study of its cultural and social interdigitation is ignored by most academics. Our students have little historical perspective on the machine that they grew up with, though its further evolution will be a fundamental influence on the lives and careers of most of them. Beyond the temporary interest of the millenarian panic of Y2K lie the much more interesting and important questions of how we will deal with the increasing capability of our machines (conundrums addressed in books like Kurzweil 1999 and Hayles 1999). And then there are the banks, telephone networks, electrical power grids, air traffic control and airline reservation systems, brokerage, publishing and global information systems --all of which are utterly dependent upon networked computers.

Our library resources are tolerably rich in areas that bear upon the history of computer evolution and prophesy its future directions. In addition to the wealth of books in the QA76 area ("Computers" from the Library of Congress' point of view), we also have a good array of magazines and journals that cover the last 20 years of microcomputer evolution. As I did with the Technology course, I would encourage students to explore the possibilities of those little-used resources for their projects. The World Wide Web is also a powerful tool for research on past, present, and future.

Research projects in the form of web pages are eminently practical (as demonstrated by those created for the Technology course), and have the additional appeal of being public documents, but the really important work of the course (as is especially appropriate for University Scholars courses) is in discussion of issues raised by readings and other stimulus materials. The course could begin with meetings in the last weeks of the Winter term, in which I would use the 1996 and 1998 PBS documentaries to establish a baseline of knowledge and define some of the basic questions to be explored during the Spring term.