Next spring, I’ll be teaching for the second time the capstone course for our library’s information studies minor. Listed in our course catalog as “Advanced Topics in Information Studies,” each instructor can focus that course on the topic of their choosing. I’ve decided I’d like to take another crack at teaching a socio-technical analysis of artificial intelligence. As you can see from my course website from spring 2024, my focus is not at all on how to use AI but rather on AI came to be and how various forces and organizations in society have been shaping its development.
It has been close to two years since I last taught this course. Although I have continued to pay close attention to developments in AI since then, in the past few months I have been making a concerted effort to shore up the foundations of what I know about the technology and about socio-technical analysis. I’ve also been talking everyone’s ear off if they happen to ask about my course, as I’m full of ideas and opinions lately that are still gelling and in need of being spoken so that I can figure out what I will do with them in my class. To save my friends, family, colleagues at work, and random strangers from consistently getting trapped in my current conversational enthusiasms (and may be looking for an exit from said conversations), I’m going to begin working things out here on my blog.
The inspiration to return to a practice of thinking by writing came from one of the books I’ve been reading in preparation for spring 2026 course: Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing by Naomi S. Baron. In a chapter that categorizes and details the reasons why humans feel compelled to write, she finds a rich history of writers who are “looking inward” and need to “bring into focus what they’re thinking,” such as:
- Flannery O’Connor “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”
- George Bernard Shaw “I do not know what I think until I write it.”
- William Faulkner “I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”
- Joan Didion “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.”
I haven’t finished Baron’s book yet, but I’m sure that she’ll return to these quotes again when she examines what will be lost if the mass of humanity embraces text extruding machines (AKA generative AI) as the primary method of composing written communication. This worry is one that I’m guessing is also at the core of John Warner’s book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, which I hope I can find time to read before my course begins.