It's been only five years since the first Amazon Kindle was sold, ten years since Google News went online, twenty years since the public was introduced to the World Wide Web, and over a century since the development of microfilm. What unites each of these historical moments was the premature public announcement of the "death of print" in the face of supposedly inevitable and revolutionary technological and economic change. Yet print remains not only a crucial part of the material information environment of all societies around the globe, but also a persistent organizing metaphor for how we understand and circulate text, numbers, and images through both broadcast and networked media. This new (and experimental) seminar will explore the perpetually-renewed "future of print" from various historical and geographical vantage points -- including our own.
