212. Information in Society

This course is, in practice, a special topics seminar that changes from year to year. The overall theme is methods and approaches to understanding the interaction of technology and the social, with an emphasis on approaches and topics that are relevant to design of information systems and technologies. A major (but not the only) foundation for this course is the interdisciplinary field known as Science and Technology Studies (STS). Topics will depend on who attends and what people are interested in. We will not plan out the entire semester in advance, but will make choices among an array of topics based on what the class is interested in. Past years' topics include Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Activity Theory, configuring users, epistemic cultures, situated action, and distributed cognition.