Our readings for this semester are drawn from a range of relevant fields and sub-fields. We will be dipping in and out of several texts and their respective modes of discourse, including scholarly pieces, critical essays, to journalistic explorations. I encourage you to consider our reading list a partial, unfinished constellation of knowledge and scholarship. As you read and respond to these texts, be open to connections (however thin), resonances, and disjunctions among all of them.
Week 1
“The Modern History of Computing.” 2000. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computing-history/
McCracken, Harry. 2014. “The Web at 25: Revisiting Tim Berners-Lee’s Amazing Proposal.” http://time.com/21039/tim-berners-lee-web-proposal-at-25/
O’Reilly, Tim. 2005. “What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
Week 2
Krukowski, Damon. 2017. Ways of Hearing, Episode #1: Time. 24.51 https://www.radiotopia.fm/showcase/ways-of-hearing
Gleick, James. 2011. “The Information” – excerpt. The New York Times Sunday Book Review. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/excerpt-the-information-by-james-gleick.html
Anderson, Chris. 2004. “The Long Tail.” Wired Magazine. https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/
Week 3
Gizmodo. 2018. “100 Websites That Shaped the Internet as We Know It.” https://gizmodo.com/100-websites-that-shaped-the-internet-as-we-know-it-1829634771
Silberman, Steve. 1994. “We’re Teen, We’re Queer, and We’ve Got E-mail.” Wired Magazine. https://www.wired.com/1994/11/gay-teen/
boyd, danah. 2007. “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1518924 (Also in Moodle as a PDF)
Week 4
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press.
Read the Introduction, Chapter 5, and Conclusion (All in Moodle as PDFs)
(A version of Chapter 5 is also available https://www.technologyreview.com/s/402471/why-heather-can-write/)
Week 5
Phillips, Whitney and Milner, Ryan M. 2017. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online.
Read the Introduction and Chapters 1 + 4 (in Moodle as PDF)
Week 6
Phillips, Whitney and Milner, Ryan M. 2017. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online.
Read Chapter 2 (in Moodle as PDF)
Coleman, E. Gabriella. 2012. “Am I Anonymous?” Limn 2: Crowds and Clouds. https://limn.it/articles/am-i-anonymous/
Week 7
Wachter-Boettcher, Sarah. 2017. Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and other Threads of Toxic Tech.
Read Chapters 1–3 (in Moodle as PDF)
Parrish, Allison. 2016. “Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic.” Open Hardware Summit presentation. http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting-new-hacker-ethic/
Week 8
Wachter-Boettcher, Sarah. 2017. Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and other Threads of Toxic Tech.
Read Chapters 7, 9 + 10 (in Moodle as PDF)
Beck, Estee. 2017. “Sustaining Critical Literacies in the Digital Information Age: The Rhetoric of Sharing, Prosumerism, and Digital Algorithmic Surveillance.” https://wac.colostate.edu/books/social/chapter2.pdf (Also in Moodle as a PDF)
Week 9
Zomorodi, Manoush and Poyant, Jen. 2018. ZigZag Podcast Season 2 Episode 11: If Capitalism and Socialism Had a Baby. https://zigzagpod.com/2018/12/20/s2-ep11-if-capitalism-and-socialism-had-a-baby/
Pollock, Rufus. 2018. Open Revolution. https://openrevolution.net/media/open-revolution.pdf
Read Chapters 1–2 (Also in Moodle as a PDF)
Week 10
Jeong, Sarah. 2018. “I tried leaving Facebook. I couldn’t.” The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/28/17293056/facebook-deletefacebook-social-network-monopoly
Week 11
Lessig, Lawrence. 2006. Code 2.0. http://www.codev2.cc/
Read Chapters 1–5 + 16 (Also in Moodle as a PDF)
Week 12
(Spring Break – no readings)
Week 13
Everett, Anna. 2012. “‘Have We Become Postracial Yet?’ Race and Media Technologies in the Age of President Obama.” Race After the Internet. Edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White. Routledge. 146–167.
(in Moodle as PDF)
Week 14
Etling, Bruce; Faris, Robert; and Palfrey, John. 2010. “Political Change in the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing.” SAIS Review. (in Moodle as PDF)
Week 15
Watercutter, Angela. 2018. “I Learned About Climate Change by Watching Fortnite on Twitch.” Wired Magazine. https://www.wired.com/story/fortnite-twitch-climate-scientists/
Read, Max. 2018. “How Much of the Internet is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.” New York Magazine / Intelligencer. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
Week 16
Dyson, George. 2019. “Childhood’s End.” Edge. https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-childhoods-end
Other last-minute readings TBD.
Finals Week – No Readings.