Module Title: Communication, Technology and Politics
Module Leader: Dr Sharath Srinivasan
Module Description:
The disruptive effects of the digital age for politics are apparent for all to see, yet they arise out of a longer history of the complex and dynamic relationship between communication technology and contentious politics. The invention of writing’s relationship to the emergence of bureaucratic power, the age of political reformation and nationalism and the advent of the printing press, global empires and the role of telegraph and broadcast, and now social media and generative AI in a time of democratic crisis: communication technologies have played an important role in manifesting and shaping profound political change. This module takes a historicised approach to the relationship between communication technology and politics to understand authority, power and political contestation in a digital age. The approach avoids presentism and exceptionalising transformations in our digital age as ‘like nothing ever before’, while also not underestimating the importance of recent upheavals in changing the actors, logics and practices of politics. Motivating these enquiries is a strong normative purpose: learning from recent and past experience, how can we radically rethink civic action and democratic popular sovereignty in our technological present and future?