This week, both Avery and Sherwood wrote about different aspects of information technology in the early nineteenth-century United States, and two different approaches to the question of how news/information/learning “worked” in an expanding American nation.
Avery linked Round’s discussion of Native appropriations of American print and religious cultures to John’s discussion of the expanding postal system. She also introduced a new theorist – Granovetter – who “proved that novel information tends to come from nodes that are not well-connected to the network (weakly tied to other nodes).” I wonder how Native print culture would fit into Granovetter’s model – did American Indians mostly consume news from other sites of American news production, or did Indian print culture percolate into wider American information contexts?
Sherwood took a different approach to networks that connected Native and white Americans. He pointed out that fluency in multiple languages (both English and Native syllabaries) allowed American Indians access to broader spheres of information. One of the things we’ll discuss in class today is how much power those spheres actually gave Native peoples, and how they deployed that power.
