Image from cover of The New Inquiry, no. 2

DH150, University of California, Los Angeles
Professor Miriam Posner (mposner@humnet.ucla.edu)
To book an appointment with me, click here.

If all you knew about “millennials” was what you heard on the news, you’d think that college-aged people spent every waking hour texting and had never read anything longer than a Buzzfeed list. Of course, we know that isn’t true. People in their late teens and early twenties are as thoughtful, diverse, and interested in the world as anyone else. And the Internet isn’t evenly distributed. While some people count on near-seamless Internet connectivity, others can only access the Web sporadically.

Still, perhaps something about life is different for people who grew up with the Internet. So how do we think about these differences without defaulting to alarmist diatribes about sexting, or utopian proclamations about the Internet as a realm of boundless freedom? How do we talk about generational difference without flattening diversity or ascribing supernatural power to technology?

This class takes on this question by examining other moments of big technological change — film, television, telephone — and comparing them to the way we talk about technology today. We’ll also read the best writing about what it means to be a young adult in our current moment, and we’ll unpack the notions of “adolescence” and “young adulthood,” which turn out to be historically contingent categories themselves. Our goal is to develop a vocabulary for talking about technological and cultural change that accommodates the diversity and contingency of human experience.