CS560

Computational infrastructure is an omnipresent component of our daily lives. Through social media, financial instrumentation, systems of data aggregation, surveillance, and artificial intelligence, the digital increasingly mediates our relationships to work, to information, and to each other. This course will aim to understand these digital worlds not only in their technological registers, but as socially structured phenomena. If these systems, codes, and algorithms have become fundamental to everyday life, and they are not the products of inevitable or essential meanings, but human interlocution, it is necessary to interrogate: the social contexts from which they emerge, the underlying social forces which continually map meaning onto them, and the social futures they attempt to bring into being. In this, we can better understand the underlying political, cultural, and ethical implications of engaging in the seemingly objective work of writing and analyzing code. To do so, we will examine a wide range of source material, with forays into: ethical philosophy, economics, aesthetics and artistic practice, media and social media artifacts, public policy, as well as specific computational technologies themselves. In short, this course endeavors to provide a series of critical tools to better assess our contemporary digital world.

School of Computing and Information Sciences

Portland