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Home > MSI Degree > Course Catalogue > Course Description
SI 541: Systems, Networks, and Webs
Course offers historical, comparative, and theoretical perspectives on the evolution of major infrastructures from the 19th century to the present. Students explore three main types of infrastructures: transportation, electric power, and communications/information systems.
The course draws out structural similarities and differences among the historical trajectories of major sociotechnical systems that underlie the industrialized world and its offspring, the information society. For example, transportation infrastructures face their most difficult challenges at the interface between different transport modes, as in ports (where shipping connects with trucking and rail) and airports (where air transit connects with automobile, truck, bus, subway, train, and pedestrian modes). These intermodal problems in transport systems find significant parallels in information infrastructures, where data conversion (from analog to digital, or from one digital format to another) creates difficult problems for system designers and users.
Students examine how infrastructures form, how they change, and how they shape (and are shaped by) social systems. A major focus is the role of standards (e.g., railroad track gauge, alternating current voltages, and TCP/IP) and standard-setting bodies in creating "ground rules" for infrastructure development. Concepts such as "technological momentum" (the tendency of large technical systems to become increasingly resistant to change), "load factor" (maximizing the use of available system capacity), and "interdependence" (among components and between connected infrastructures) are explored. Students learn to articulate the differences between systems, networks, and webs (or internetworks) as both technological and social phenomena.
Credits: 3
Term offered: Winter
Group Project: Yes
Home > MSI Degree > Course Catalogue > Course Description
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