Democracy and Technology

Athenian democracy could be direct because it was local; modern democracy is representative in part because citizens can no longer gather in a single assembly. And as the territorial size and number of citizens have grown, democracy has become unthinkable without modern technologies of transportation and communication. These technologies make it theoretically possible to maintain ongoing channels of equal, free communication between citizens and those who exercise political power in their name. This course is focused on examining how this dynamic has played out in practice, and in situating current technological controversies in historical and theoretical context.

A few of the questions we will be asking: How do modern technologies facilitate and bedevil democratic ideals of communication? Who controls the direction of technological change, and how could that power be distributed more democratically? Is capitalism destroying the democratic potential of the Internet? Was that potential always overblown?

The primary aim of the class is to give students the theoretical and historical tools to think critically about the relationship between technology and democracy in a way that takes neither our current democracy nor our current technology for granted. We will read and analyze a wide range of texts, but we will mainly be analyzing technology through the lens of democracy and democratic theory.

One of the key themes of the class will be the importance of educated, critical citizens for a democracy, and a secondary goal of the class is to think critically about the place of technology in our own intellectual lives.