An International Conference
October 8-10, 1999
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Rethinking the History of Information
Moderator: James Buzard
Nuclear
Information: One Rhetorical Moment
in the Construction
of the Information Age
Charles
Bazerman, University of California, Santa Barbara
While our contemporary understanding
of the meanings, social force, and rhetorical dynamics of information come
in multiple flavors and from multiple sources, one major impulse grew in
the Nuclear Information Movement in the late 1950's. In the Greater St.
Louis Citizens' Committee For Nuclear Information and its journal -- first
called Nuclear Information, then Scientist and Citizen, and
finally Environment -- we can see the development of politically-motivated,
community-based, and citizen-directed information, set against information
that is produced and controlled by government and corporations and motivated
by institutional needs. |
Potholes on the Information Highway:
Congress as a
Publisher in the 19th Century
Oz
Frankel, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
[The complete text of Oz Frankel's paper is available.]
This paper probes the activities
of the nineteenth century American government as a prolific publisher of
reports, surveys, exploration accounts and even books. The publication
and dissemination of official documents became part of the performative
dimension of the governing process. By creating serial publications and
by establishing institutions for the accumulation of knowledge Congress
and the administration partook in the making of what Geoffrey Nunberg recently
termed the "phenomenology of information" -- the set of material conditions
as well as surrounding discourses of knowledge and authority that allowed
for the normalization of discursive material as "facts." Employing a few
case studies the paper demonstrates that some of the problematics featured
in the contemporary debate on the future of information (whose context
often is the ungoverned nature of cyberspace) were evident in that early
stage -- namely questions of authority, authorship, access and ownership. |
Henry
James and Telegraphic Realism:
Fiction and/as Technology
Richard
Menke, Stanford University
In setting his 1898 tale
"In the Cage" at a telegraph counter, Henry James was appropriating a technology
that earlier novelists such as Dickens had used as an analogue for the
workings of fictional realism: electric telegraphy. But James's new attention
to telegraphy as a material practice and a medium indicates the way in
which the imaginative possibilities of even literary "media" such as realistic
fiction may change as newer technologies emerge. |
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