Friday 5 - Saturday 6 September 2014, Darwin College, Cambridge

This symposium will gather researchers working on the social, economic, and cultural implications of changes in information technologies in the early modern period in Russia. Questions about the way information has been encoded, stored, distributed, exchanged and retrieved profoundly impact society at all levels. Information technologies mediate relations between the public and the private, between the powerful and the ruled. They provide ever more efficient instruments for surveillance and social control, yet also empower popular expression and action. A fresh look at information technologies in their historical and cultural contexts prompts new patterns of association, new tools of analysis, and challenges straightforward assumptions about technology-driven change. We hope to open a discussion, through individual research papers, about the shifting interrelationships and functionalities of specific information technologies in the early modern period.

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