By Dr. Shrout<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

The reading for today makes several sweeping arguments about American information technology from the early colonial era to the American Revolution. Centrally, he contends that early American information was top-down and restrictive, in contrast to the more open information environment of the early republic. Protestantism, Brown also posits, was central to this process.<\/p>\n

Sherwood<\/a> takes on this correlation between Protestantism and the opening up of information networks, contending that Protestantism’s central tenets were antithetical to hierarchies. I’d add to his critique another which is that not all people in early America were Protestant. I look forward to hearing more about how other religious structures would have impacted information access.<\/p>\n

Avery<\/a> continued to raise the themes that Sherwood brought up (and invoked the concept of priming, which is similar to framing). She also raises another critique \u2013 that Brown tells a story of social progress \u2013 known in history as Teleology or Whiggish history \u2013 and fails to consider challenges to that narrative of progress. I’ll add some more questions to those that Avery ended with. In a world where only propertied white men could vote, can we really talk about an informed citizenry as being pervasive? What about the information status of non-citizens?<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr. Shrout The reading for today makes several sweeping arguments about American information technology from the early colonial era to the American Revolution. Centrally, he contends that early American information was top-down and restrictive, in contrast to the more open information environment of the early republic. Protestantism, Brown also posits, was central to this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}