Media and Religion

Typewriters, trains, electricity, telephones, telegraph, stock tickers, plate glass, shop windows, radio, television, computers, Internet, World Wide Web, cell phones, tablets, search engines, big data, social networks, GPS, virtual reality, Google glass.  The technologies turn back on their creators to transform them into their own image.  This course will consider the relationship between mechanical, electronic, and digital technologies and different forms of twentieth-century capitalism.  The regimes of industrial, consumer, and financial shape the conditions of cultural production and reproduction in different ways.  The exploration of different theoretical perspectives will provide alternative interpretations of the interplay of media, technology, and religion that make it possible to chart the trajectory from modernity to postmodernity and beyond.