This fall, I'm teaching a course called "Literature of Information Overload." It's a 200-level undergraduate course in English. Students will mostly be sophomore English majors, I'd imagine.
I need help with selecting texts for this course! Below is a draft of the course description and a list of texts I've started (obviously I won't include all this on the syllabus, but I just wanted to give a sense of what I'm thinking). I'm looking for fiction, non-fiction, films -- you name it. Even if I don't use something in the syllabus, I'd like to compile a longer list of "recommended reading and resources" to post on the course website. I'm open to all ideas/suggestions.
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Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
Gertrude Stein, 1946
Information overload is a contemporary cultural concern with a rich past. This course will cover a broad sampling of texts from different time periods to consider how our current confrontation/struggle with digital technologies both is and is not new. We will pay attention to the various forms that information overload takes: a pathological condition, a burden on attention and social bonds, a renaissance of knowledge access and production, and even a non-issue. Most importantly for our purposes, the texts we read and view will help us to ask how our understanding of knowledge, literature, and even ourselves evolves alongside technological innovations. Through studying texts that comment on, represent, and/or actually produce the feeling of overload in readers, we will encounter questions like:
- How do people experience and describe information overload (or a sense of "too much") across cultures and chapters of technological development? In what ways is the contemporary predicament of information management similar to and different from struggles of the past?
- How does information overload contribute to distraction and changing modes of attention, and why is this relevant to today's readers of literature?
- What are the differences between information and literature? What is at stake in efforts to make a distinction?
- If we accept the story of how humans are becoming increasingly dependent on their reference tools and technological devices, what new types of machine-human hybrids emerge? What reasons might we find for accepting or resisting this cyborg vision?
Through engaging with these questions and the texts (some alphabetic and others visual) on the syllabus, we will learn how information overload functions as a subject matter, a form or structuring device, and an affect generated by the work itself. This final affective quality of information overload (the feeling of having too much to know and organize) is a familiar frenemy of college students, so I hope that you will draw on your personal experiences to enlighten our discussions and inform your writing.
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ideas for literary texts
Jonathan Swift, "The Battle of the Books" (1704)
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (1855)
Gertrude Stein, selections from Tender Buttons and/or "Composition as Explanation"
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel" (1941)
Thomas Pynchon, "Entropy" (1960)
Franz Kafka, "The Burrow" (1971)
Michael Joyce, Was: annales nomadique: a novel of internet (2007)
Something YHCHI
Nick Montfort & Stephanie Strickland, Sea and Spar Between (2010)
ideas for critical/theoretical texts
Alex Wright, selections from Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (2007) Specifically the introduction and chapters on "The Ice Age Information Explosion" and "The Age of Alphabets"
Tom Standage, selections from The Victorian Internet (2007)
Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (1945)
Neil Postman, "Informing Ourselves to Death" (1990)
Philip Elmer-Dewitt, Time magazine article: "Take A Trip into the Future on the Electronic Superhighway" (1993)
Clay Shirky, "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure" (2008)
Ann Blair, "Information overload, the early years" (2010) or a selection from Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010)
Nick Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (2008)
Cathy Davidson, introduction and chapter 6 ("The Changing Workplace") from Now You See It (2011)
Elizabeth Gruber Garvey, selections from Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (2012)
