In this course we explore the Internet, and related networks of people and devices, as an historically unique global media ecology in which new forms of social organization and cultural practice have emerged since its beginnings in the late 1960s. Using anthropological understandings of community, nation, and public sphere as our starting point, we explore the history of the Internet as both a product and producer of the beliefs and practices of specific communities, from engineers employed by the US military to hippie communes to Persian bloggers to the Anonymous movement. Along the way, we explore how the Internet has created a space for new forms of social action and political imagination which both challenge and reproduce established institutions such as the nation state, the newspaper, and the corporation. In addition, we explore how the Internet itself, as an assemblage of technologies and technical practices, has changed from a network for the communication of messages to a politically contested sphere of exchange in which social data has become a form of territory.
