Prerequisite(s): CMST 301. Too often in today’s discussions of “new media” we overlook the ways in which “old media” were at one time themselves quite novel. Scholarly and popular analyses of the shift to digital media, for example, eerily trace arguments previously made about television, radio, and the telegraph (not to mention oral and written culture). This course will examine these arguments in the context of the Media Ecology tradition. To do this, students will study and debate the foundational work of Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, Walter Ong, and others in order to put the technological medium at the center of our inquiry into the longer history of new media.