Information-Communication Technology and Society

The baseline of this course is a finding that despite of the growing role of information and communication technologies in public and private life, the public discourse offers predominantly simplified or even misleading understandings of mutual relationships between technologies and social processes. The first phase of the course follows the inductive approach through which students gain descriptive knowledge about relevant global phenomena in the field of social aspects of information and communication technologies (The topics depend on relevant topics, but are essentially related to the field of social movements, questions of internet governance, mobile phones, internet of things and related phenomena). Students on the basis of introspection and group discussion form starting research hypotheses related to the examined social phenomena.

In the second phase students gain knowledge about fundamental paradigms of relationship between technologies and society: technological determinism, utopianism and disutopianism, social constructionism, social shaping of technology, social informatics, actornetwork theory. Students also learn about key theories of information society, their criticisms and various modes of measuring and monitoring social aspects of information and communication technologies. On the theoretical basis students critically evaluate and improve starting hypotheses about the chosen social phenomena, which are eventually presented in a form of seminar paper.