Learning Objectives and Discussion Questions
Discursive Practices and Paradigms: Models for Knowledge Production

Recent media and technology theory has been influenced by Foucault's approach to discourse and the discursive objectification of objects of knowledge and interpretation. Foucault also provides important models for the study of all media culture in the way cultures construct media objects and genres in institutions (for example, the entertainment industries, advertising, the art world, fashion, the music industry).

For interdisciplinary studies generally, Kuhn's idea of "paradigms" is more cited than understood, and is usefully compared with Foucault to disclose two different models for how socially constituted objects of knowledge are formed.

Compare Foucault's model of discourse to Kuhn's paradigm: both question the institutional foundations of knowledge and the formation of objects of knowledge, but from different traditions and working "paradigms" of the own intellectual communities. Foucault's theory of discourse, objects, disciplines, and the circulation of power through discourse can be seen as a "paradigm shift" (adopting Kuhn's metaphor) in doing history and cultural theory, both in its "Copernican Revolution" of de- or re-centering discourse and sites of cultural power.

Richard Rorty's view of philosophies (all theories) as forms of "redescription" of questions and problems with no "final vocabulary" (an ultimately true-once-and-for-all system of discourse) is a powerful approach usefully aligned with Foucault. For Rorty, each philosophical or scientific "vocabulary" (a universe of discourse with its own dominant metaphors) is a description of the world that must compete for validity through argumentation, justification, persuasion, and collective use.

You'll see that these philosophers and theorists are united in taking a "systems theory" approach, also found in Latour's "Actor-Network" theory, cultural semiotics, and Debray's "mediology." Yuri Lotman, who established important groundwork in cultural semiotics, viewed language and discourse as "modeling systems" for other "second order" cultural systems in all cultural genres. Debray is looking for how to describe the normally invisible mediations, the configuration of technologies, media, and institutions of mediation (transmission) for different historical moments and the present day.

Readings

• Thomas Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture. (Finish: Chaps. 4-6).
• C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959) (excerpts: read chaps. 1 and 3).
  • Background to many "science and culture" debates: C. P. Snow's view of the polarization of "two cultures" (sciences and engineering vs. the humanities) in the academic world has been played out in different ways in popular culture as well (think of all the clichés of humanistic people who joke about "not getting" computers). Snow's argument occasioned a fierce debate at the time, and lingers in the "science and culture" wars debates in the past two decades. Much interdisciplinary work since the 1960s has looked at ways to merge the interests of both "sides" or to see the polarization in political and ideological terms. For the question of "technology" on the "science" side of the divide, the question lingers about rival and mutually inaccessible discipline- and knowledge-domain-based cultures in academe, business, engineering, and government (to name only a few).
    
• Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigms and the "structure of scientific revolutions"
  • Excerpts from Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (1957) and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd. ed, 1970). [Read the full paragraphs from the excerpted pages.]
  • Background: Outline of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (Frank Pajares, Emory University)
  • Note the main principles of a scientific "paradigm" in Kuhn's theory (itself a paradigm): a conceptual model with heuristic value (discovery) and disciplinary norms and protocols (establishing normal science), generative of new discoveries, based in a community of practice with shared assumptions, not final but replaceable through debate, institutional shifts, and/or new empirical evidence.
• Michel Foucault: Discursive Practices as Structures for Knowledge and Authority
  • Foucault, Readings from "Discourse on Language" and The Archaeology of Knowledge:
    Foucault, "Discourse on Language": excerpt in pdf.
    Foucault, "Discourse on Language" and Archaeology of Knowledge: key excerpts.
    Irvine, Outline: Comparing Kuhn and Foucault.
    Summary of "Discourse on Language", Lecture Notes, Prof. John Lye.
    
• Richard Rorty: Philosophy, Metaphor, Redescription and the Consequences of Vocabularies
  • Introduction and overview of Rorty's thought, from Rorty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  • “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope,” from Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 191-210).
  • Introduction to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
  • "The Contingency of Language," excerpt from chap. 1 of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
• Bruno Latour, Science and Technology Studies, Actor-Network Theory [an introduction]
  • Latour, "Actor-Network Theory: Some Clarifications."
  • Science and Technology Studies (STS) Wiki on "Actor-Network Theory."

Supplementary Readings

• Giorgio Agamben, "What is a Paradigm?" On Kuhn and Foucault.
  Lecture and discussion, European Graduate School (2002).
  “What is a Paradigm?” In The Signature of All Things: On Method, 9-32. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2009. Excerpt (pdf).
• John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995) (read Introduction). Among other things, a significant redescription of a post-C. P. Snow view of science and culture.

Questions/Applications to other cases

Student Wiki Discussion

Inventing Computation: Key Ideas
We will study the computer industry later in the seminar. This unit focuses on the development of computation as the core model for computers, information design, and all digital media. We will approach the questions from a non-specialist perspective, but it's important for everyone to get a conceptual grasp of the core ideas in computation because they are now pervasive throughout many sciences, including the cognitive sciences and all information processing (what is happening in the Google algorithm).

Readings and Background

• Irvine, An Introduction to Computational Concepts
• Daniel Hillis, The Pattern On The Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. New York: Basic Books, 1999. (excerpts from chaps. 1-2).
• Andrew Hodges, Turing (Great Philosopher's Series). London: Phoenix, 1997; New York: Routledge, 1999.
  [Web version of Hodges' short, accessible book about Alan Turning's main ideas. In a fundamental sense, all computers and digital devices are "Turing Machines".]
  • See also Hodges' accessible biography of Turing.
  • Hodges also maintains an online scrapbook of Turing archival sources, including the issues around the "Turning Machine" debate.
• Background on John von Neumann's computation models:
  • William Poundstone, Review of Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson, New York Times, 5/4/2012.
  • Von Neumann Computer Architecture

Project: Lessons on Code Academy (http://www.codecademy.com)

• Try the self-paced tutorial lessons on the Python programming language and Web Fundamentals provided at Code Academy (see the tracks: http://www.codecademy.com/tracks). Create an account and let the tutorial prompt you thorugh the lessons. Go as far as you can.
• These lessons will guide you through some basic computing concepts and also let you write some code and see the results when it runs.

Supplementary and Advanced Readings

• Charles Schmidt (Rutgers University), Computation and Cognition (online readings for course)
• Seymour Papert on Warren McCulloch: Introduction to Embodiments of Mind (MIT Press, 1965)
• Harvey Cragon, "The Von Neumann Machine," excerpt from Computer Architecture and Implementation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. pp. 1-13.

Student Wiki Discussion

Learning Objectives: Learning to work with the key concepts

Using the core theories of semiotics, how can cultural semiotics be applied to all forms of media technologies as used today? How does interpretation and meaning-making work across media forms and genres (movies as "commentaries" on books, TV genres, or comics) and cultures (cross-globalization interpretations). How would we describe the semiotic system of the Web, Google, Facebook, YouTube? How do we extend the theory to examples from both high and low culture?

Media, communications, and cultural theory today assumes the concepts of dialogism and intertextuality as foundational ideas. Intertextuality should now be redefined for contemporary media studies as intermediality, or the ongoing dialog among many kinds of cultural expressions in any medium or media technology, especially digital media across networks. We now live in an environment of continual cross-mediation: we can experience similar "content" in print, in advertising on the street, on TV, and on the Web. A new work emerges within a network of prior and contemporary works, and we interpret expression in a variety of genres that cut across our media forms--TV, Web, books and magazines, art works, music.

The model of dialogism (from Mikhail Bakhtin) is a precursor of more recent network theory and other systems theory that focuses on interdependence of relations and ongoing reconfiguration with new information and nodal connections.

The power of the concept of dialogism and intermediality extends both to our ongoing interpretations of existing cultural expressions (texts, images, film, TV, web sites), and also to the generation or production of new works or expressions that are possible from the producer-communities' access to a cultural encyclopedia of contents, symbolic relationships, codes, and rules of formation.

Remember that the theories of intertextuality and dialogism are not ways of describing influences, borrowings, sources, quotations, or explicit sampling on a surface level of recognitions. It's not about matching quotes or words from a dictionary, but about assumed works, genres, codes, and shared cultural knowledge that make any interpretation or new work possible.

The concepts of intertextuality/intermediality and cultural encyclopedia (Eco) usefully merge together the idea of unlimited semiosis in semiotic theory (expressions are always interpreted through additional expressions with no final closure), and Derrida's idea of the supplement, the necessary structure of meaning systems that always attempt to disclose meaning by supplements to expressions, supplements that present themselves as the "inner" meaning contained in a prior expression.

A cultural extension of unlimited semiosis is found in Lotman's incompleteness theorem: every culture experiences itself as incomplete, and continually generates new supplements, commentaries, new expressions, new statements, new works, that extend the fund of possible cultural meanings.

Intertextuality/intermediality and the cultural encyclopedia are thus useful concept to explain how any interpretation is possible and how new works a generated from the internalized rules and codes of a cultural system.

Readings: Semiotic Theory: Background

• Irvine, An Introduction to Meaning Making Systems: Key Concepts for a Cybersemiotics
• Smith and Riley, 102- 108 (on Barthes); chap. 11, 180-184 (on Bakhtin and Eco)
• Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners, read sections 1-2.
• Irvine, Essentials of Semiotics
• Mieke Bal, "Semiotics for Beginners," from On Meaning-Making (1994).
• Semiotics reference work:
  Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio, “Semiotics Today: From Global Semiotics to Semioethics, a Dialogic Response.” Signs 1 (2007): 29-127. [A thorough review of issues from within the semiotics profession; use as reference. Focus on sections 1-4; 20; 28; 29.]

Dialogism & Intertextuality to Intermediality

• Mikhail Bakhtin: Key Theory from his major writings (On Dialogism, Heteroglossia, Polyphony)
• Kristeva, excerpt from "Word, Dialogue, and Novel." From Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986]). [A statement with wide influence.]
• Gunhild Agger, "Intertextuality Revisited: Dialogues and Negotiations in Media Studies." Canadian Journal of Aesthetics, 4, 1999. [Good overview of theories as they apply to media studies.]
• Bolter and Gruisin, Remediation (excerpts).
• Irvine, Jazz and the Abstract Truth: Dialogism and Hybrid Culture (lecture presentation)
  

Dialogism to Appropriation, Remix & Postproduction

• Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence," Harpers Magazine, Feb. 2007. [All writing has always already been a hybrid collage of language, sources, references, unconscious quotations, remix of inherited written culture.]
• Nicholas Bourriaud, Postproduction (2002). Our new production platforms--increasingly using or  modeled on digital production--allow an explicit awareness of new works being remixed like the post-production process in music, movies, and television.

The Cultural Semiotics Model

• Yuri Lotman, "On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture" (pdf)
  • Very important essay for this unit. Focus on the key points.
• Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding."

Working with Bakhtin & Eco: The Activity of Meaning and Interpretation

• The idea of "the cultural encyclopedia" (Umberto Eco):
• Eco, "The Theory of Signs and the Role of the Reader." [see especially section III]
• Irvine, Definition of "cultural encyclopedia" in Key Words and Concepts for Media Theory

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

• William Gibson's Site for Pattern Recognition: A novel about a "cool hunter" who uses (implicitly and explicitly) semiotics to code and decode corporate branding. Fun and very engaging. By the writer who coined the term "cyberspace."
  William Gibson's website | Wikipedia overview and background | Interview with William Gibson

Student Wiki Discussion

• Discuss a popular culture or technology example or related group of examples that shows how meanings are nodal points of prior and contemporary relationships, connections and assumptions (movie, music, Website, TV program).

Learning Objectives
Gaining a foundation in the influential philosophies of media and technology which have shaped discourse and theory since the 1930s and the current terms of the debate about "new" and digital media..

Questions and Problems:
Is there, or can there be, a generalized or generalizable "theory of technology" or "theory of media technology" in relation to culture? The ideology of "technology" is interwoven in much of the discourse of America and the developed world, but it is seldom clear what the referent of the term "technology" is. The most popularized representations of "technology" span both utopian and dystopian views and projections. Which views dominate the various kinds of technology? Consider some of the main traditions of theory and discourse on technology and culture since "critical theory" (various post-Marxist positions like Benjamin, Debord, and Adorno/Horkheimer), including techno-determinist views (McLuhan), and the cross-institutional view of Debray and Latour (whom we will consider in more detail later).

Readings:

• Irvine, "Media Theory: An Introduction" (working draft of book chapter)
  
  
• Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility." [Another online copy.] The first English translation. Focus on sections: Pref., I-VI, and XII.
  Compare with the more accurate revised translation in the new edition of Benjamin's writings (Harvard Univ. Press, 2003). Benjamin's title in German is "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" = "The Work of Art in the Era of its Technological Reproducibility."
  Focus on sections: Pref., I-VI, and XII.
  • Benjamin was part of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist writers, but proposed his own more nuanced analyses. His argument is still in the grip of presuppositions about "mass culture" that couldn't deal with emerging populist trends in modernism and possible subversive uses of mass culture.
  • He was writing as at time when Fascist capitalism and state-controlled economies threatened to convert all media and cultural forms into tools of ideology.
  • Note the troubled questions about technology and agency and a historical narrative about technological development in section VI.
  • Benjamin: Philosophical Background (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): see sections 6-8
• Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) [Another online copy.]
  (Selections: Read sections 1-6, 10-11, 17-18, 24-30)
  Background on Debord and the Situationist Movement. | Wikipedia background (weak, but use for outline)
  
  
• Revisiting Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message" (Excerpts from Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man. 2nd Edition)
• Daniel Czitrom, "Metahistory, Mythology, and the Media: The American Thought of Marshall McLuhan," excerpt from Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982; read pp.172-182.
  
  
• Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (excerpts). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
  A very influential book in the field.
  Read selections from chap. 1 (What is New Media) and chap. 2 ("The Interface")
  Note the categories Manovich set up in chap. 1 for defining "New Media."
  • Author's website with supplements to the book.
• Lev Manovich, "New Media: Eight Propositions." Excerpt from “New Media from Borges to HTML,” from The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The MIT Press, 2002.

Supplemental Readings in Media Theory

• Adorno and Horkheimer: "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." The Frankfurt School philosophy.
  Pdf version. Web/html version.
  First published in German in 1944, a determinist view of popular media as controlled by capitalist state-sanctioned monopolies. Consider the assumed narrative trajectory, myths of origin, teleology, and implied utopia.

Media, Film, Video, Advertising Cases

• Ridley Scott, Blade Runner
• David Cronenberg, Videodrome
• John Cameron's Avatar: The seamless flow between camera work and CGI: it's all in the digital editing platform now.
• Apple Computer, "1984" Macintosh commercial, broadcast during 1984 Superbowl

Student Wiki Discussion

Learning Objectives:
After surveying some of the main traditions of theory, can we move beyond replicating the academic, institutionalized authorities to a view that integrates the study of culture, technology, social institutions, history, and economics? Debray proposes a new point of view that takes for granted the intellectual traditions of the modern and postmodern eras, but doesn't get stuck in any of them. Mediology looks for what's left out in traditional disciplinary views and subject matter--the necessary relations between technologies and larger social functions that are often invisible because they are everywhere presupposed and entailed in a network of relationships.

What are the heuristic and self-reflexive possibilities of mediology for current and future studies of culture, media, and technology? How does mediology continue, extend, or critique other theory traditions we have examined: communication theory, semiotics/semiology, postmodernism?

Readings

• Regis Debray, "What is Mediology?" Le Monde Diplomatique, Aug., 1999. Trans. Martin Irvine.
• Debray, Media Manifestos, pp. 1-40; 69-79; 97-107; Tables, 171-174. (Excerpts in pdf.)
• Debray, Transmitting Culture, trans. Eric Rauth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
  Excerpts in pdf: From Chaps. 1-2; from Chap. 7, "Ways of Doing."
  • Review of Transmitting Culture: Constantina Papolias, "Of Tools and Angels: Regis Debray's Mediology," Theory, Culture & Society, 21/3 (2004): 165-70.
  • Daniel Chandler, "Processes of Mediation." Background to the issues that Debray is thinking beyond.
• Irvine, Introduction to Mediology and Actor Network Theory (presentation)
• Irvine, Lecture Notes: Introduction to Mediology (web)
• Frédéric Vandenberghe, "Régis Debray and Mediation Studies, or How Does an Idea Become a Material Force?" Thesis Eleven, 89, May 2007: 23-42. [Detailed philosophical critique of mediology and traditions of thought forming Debray's context.]
• Steven Maras, "On Transmission: A Metamethodological Analysis (after Régis Debray)"
  (see section on Debray and transmission)

Resources/Sources/Sites

• Interview with Debray, Wired Magazine, Jan. 1995.
• Mediologie Website (French): journal articles, essays, publications.
• Regis Debray's Website (French)
• François-Bernard Huyghe (French)
• Paul Soriano (French): includes a Dictionary of Mediological Terms (in French)
• Louise Merzeau (French): theorist and photographer

New kinds of questions to ask:

• Missed institutional embeddedness of media? What are the enabling Institutions of transmission for any medium that we take for granted?
• What are the networks of forces and conditions enabling a medium or technology to have its power, authority, significance of value in a culture?
• Media as memory systems? Mediaspheres and total, reconfigurable systems of media at any given cultural moment?
• Hierarchies of media and technologies, cultural significance of various media before content or information is conveyed?
• Is the technology of the medium separable from the meaning of the content transmitted?
• Are ideologies separable from the material means (mediums) of transmission (for example, religion, politics, class structures, identities, subjectivities); that is, how is ideology interdependent with the material means of communication, information, and transmission?
• What information is transmitted in the medium itself by its form and social function?

Mediology Case Studies & Examples for Discussion:

• The Internet and Mediology: A Look at Our Current Mediasphere
• The Washington Mall: what is communicated and transmitted through this heavily encoded social space and institutional structures?
• Media and the Screen: transmission and devices: television, computer screen, iPhone, iPad
• The Fashion World and the Art World: institutions of transmission, codes, mediation and media channels
• The Museum
• The University

Learning Objectives:
Mediology shares many of the assumptions and conceptual models of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and converges with other schools of thought surrounding the use of network theory to understand technologies, science, media, and culture. ANT is based on a model of heterogeneous networks, networks with members or elements of different kinds (for example, conceiving a network in which individual actors, institutions, technologies, and industries inter-relate, as opposed a network with homogeneous elements).

How can this broad, interdisciplinary body of theory and approaches be used heuristically to interpret current issues? How could different outcomes or futures for technologies be different if all the "actors" in the network system were recognized or anticipated in design? How does mediology complement the network theory approaches in ANT?

One of the major questions--or meta-question--addressed by the theorists in this unit is that of power and agency: do networks (social, technical, mediated,etc.) structure power, and how do they distribute, circulate, allocate it? How do we recognize different levels or layers of analysis--allowing for different levels of abstraction in questions of networks and material technologies--and enable both macro- and micro-level questions and analyses?

While we dive into the midst of arguments developed in the various schools of thought in network theory, it should be noted that the theorists and their arguments are part of larger debates in the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the philosophy of science (longer history), the sociology of science, media, and communications more generally, social constructivism, and newer fields like social epistemology. Each argument is itself a node in larger networks of prior discipline-specific arguments, intellectual histories, institutional positions, disciplines, and communities of practice.

Readings

• Introduction: Sal Restivo, "Bruno Latour: The Once and Future Philosopher," excerpt from The Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, ed. George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepinsky (Boston: Blackwell, 2010). (From Sal Restivo, Dept. of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, publications page.)
• Bruno Latour, "On Actor-Network Theory: A few clarifications plus more than a few complications." [An attempt to summarize problems and questions in Actor-Network Theory.]
• John Law, "Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity" (1992, revised 2003).
• Manuel Castells, "Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society," British Journal of Sociology, 51/1 (January/March 2000), 5–24. [An overview of his underlying argument in longer books on the the Network Society.]
• Special issue of the International Journal of Communication 5 (2011) on Network Theory: Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age.
  Excellent series of articles forming a state-of-the-question portfolio. Read Introduction, Latour, and Castells; Benkler if you have time.
  • Table of contents for articles.
  • Introduction to issue by Manuel Castells, Peter Monge, Noshir Contractor.
  • Bruno Latour, "Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network Theorist." (Back-up copy)
  • Manuel Castells, "A Network Theory of Power." (Back-up copy)
  • Yochai Benkler, "Networks of Power, Degrees of Freedom." (Back-up copy)

Supplementary Reading

• Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press, 2009. (This pdf e-book version released through Creative Commons license.)
  Philosophical background and interpretation of Latour's core theories.
• Bruno Latour, "How to Write The Prince for Machines." Essay on Latour's site. Pdf version.
• Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Trans. 1993: Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press) (excerpts from chap 1).
• Sheila Jasanoff, "The Idiom of Co-production." In States of Knowledge The Co-production of Science and the Social Order, edited by Sheila Jasanoff. (London: Routledge, 2006). [You can read chapters online on the publisher's site.]

Reference and Resource Sites

• Bruno Latour's site (links to books, articles, conferences related to Latour and ANT)
• John Law's Actor Network Resource site and Lancaster University's Center for Science Studies site
• Irvine, Introduction to Mediology and Actor Network Theory (CCT505 presentation)

Examples of Tangled Agency Arguments about "Technology Effects"

• The "Is Google Making Us Stupid" Debate
  • Overview on Edge.com site
• The Social Media Effects Debate(s)

Student Wiki Discussion

• Find interesting examples and case studies for working with Latour's and Castell's ideas.

Learning Objectives
Industrial machines, scientific interventions in the human body, and computer technology have a long trajectory of representation in the popular imagination beginning with reactions to the Industrial Revolution in post-Romantic writingand art in Europe and America and in political philosophy in Marx. Much of the representation from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Thoreau's Walden up to Fritz Lang's Metropolis lead to common imagery and ideology up to the present day. What is going on in this trajectory of ideas, ideologies, emotional responses? America also has a unique "official" narrative of itself involving determinist industrialization, progress and supremacy through technology (from steam engines to rail roads, electricity, cars, air flight , telecommunications, and computers), and ongoing paranoia about "big industry" and the anti-Eden of techno-dystopias. Taking in as much of a "big picture" view as we can this week, through around 150 years of discourse and representation, what has been and is driving this narrative "story arc" and the ideologies, repressions, and misrecognitions about "technology" that continue on to today? How do we get from "the Machine in the Garden" to the techno-Frankenstein cyborg dystopias imagined in the past two decades? Fantasies of technology agency? What ideologies about bodies, machines, and human identity are represented in the cyborg, android, and intelligent machines?

Readings

• Frankenstein to Cyborgs and the Matrix
• Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (excerpts)
  Introduction | Google Books chapters
• Leo Marx, "The Idea of 'Technology' and Postmodern Pessimism," excerpted from from Does technology drive history?: the dilemma of technological determinism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
• A Technoculture Dossier: Key texts on the cultural reactions to industrialization, machines, and technology, c.1820- c.1920.
  Some identifiable currents of discourse and ideology were set in motion in the early 19th century that haunt the discourse of our own time. Most people are unaware of the controlling metaphors, imagery, and ideologies which form the first modern "technoculture." Track the responses to urbanization, machines, factories, the industrialization of city and country, the roll out electric power and telecommunications, views of the alienation of mankind from work and production, and the seemingly overwhelming power of big industrial machines.
• The Cyborg/Android: Cultural Case Study
  Donna Haraway, "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (excerpt from Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. Web/html version | Pdf version. Seminal essay for reframing the cultural symbol of the "cyborg".
  
  Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University Of Chicago Press, 1999. [Excerpts from the Introduction and Chap. 10 (Conclusion).]
  
  ----------. “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere.” Theory, Culture & Society, 23, no. 7–8 (December 1, 2006): 159 –166.
  

Filmography: The Frankenstein Effect (Portions to be Screened in Class)

• Thomas Edison, Early film, Frankenstein  (silent movie) (Youtube) (info)
• Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927) (info)
• James Whale, Frankenstein (1931) (info)
• Recent films: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Terminator, The Matrix series

Art, Culture, Machine Projections

• Ghost in the Machine, exhibition at the New Museum, New York (2012)

Student Wiki Discussions

Readings: Primary Texts, Novels

• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984). Gibson coins the word "cyberspace" as the mental representation of direct neurological "jacking in" to "the matrix" (computer network). Wikipedia background. This novel also popularized the term "the matrix" for computer networks and the software that runs them. William Gibson's website.
• Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992). Before graphical browsers or interfaces for the Net and Web, Stephenson described a fully-realized graphical interface to the Metaverse (the virtual networked world) and computer user identities as "avatars" (popular use from this novel). Wikipedia background. Neal Stephenson's website.

Background and Theory

• "Cyberpunk" in Wikipedia; see also "List of Cyberpunk works."
• Richard Kadrey and Larry McCaffrey, “Cyberpunk 101: A Schematic Guide to Storming the Reality Studio,” excerpt from Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, Duke University Press, Durham & London (1991), 17-32.
  [This guide to literary, film, TV, and music works is useful for opening up the network of affiliations and and intermedial relationships that enabled the development of the hybrid genres employed by Gibson, Stephenson, and other writers.]
• Wong Kin Yuen, "On the Edge of Spaces: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell , and Hong Kong's Cityscape," Science Fiction Studies, 27/1, 2000.

Filmography: Blade Runner to The Matrix and Japanese Anime

• Ridley Scott, dir. Blade Runner (1982). Wikipedia background. Based on the 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (info).
• David Cronenberg, dir. Videodrome (1983). Wikipedia background.
• James Cameron, dir. The Terminator I (1984) and II (1992). Wikipedia background on series.
• Wachowski Brothers, dir. The Matrix series (1999, 2003). Wikipedia info. 
• Mamoru Oshii, dir. Ghost in the Shell (Anime: 1995; based on the manga begun by Masamune Shirow in 1989; English version, 1995). Wikipedia background. Clip: birth of The Major (cyborg) scene.
• Robert Longo, dir. Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Based on a 1981 short story by William Gibson, an early conception of the wetware data world in Neuromancer. Production not approved by Gibson. Wikipedia background.
• Shinji Aramaki, dir. Appleseed (2004). Based on the Appleseed manga created by Masamune Shirow.
• Shinji Aramaki, dir. Appleseed, Ex Machina (2007). Produced by John Woo. Wikipedia background.
• Other Notable works affiliated with the genre and style:
  Tron (1982) and Tron: Legacy (2010); Robocop (1987); Strange Days (1995); Dark City (1998); Existenz (1999).

Student Wiki Discussions

Readings: A brief social history of the computer to the rise of the PC

History Background

• The Machine That Changed the World: Video Documentary Series. (Another site hosting the series.)
  Probably the best accessible documentary of computer history. Sit back, enjoy the whole story.
• Computer Museum, Timeline of Computing History
• Univ. of Pennsylvania: ENIAC Museum
• From: Alfred D. Chandler and James W. Cortada, eds., A Nation Transformed by Information How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. Oxford Univ. Press, 2000.
  Alfred Chandler, Chap. 1, Introduction.
  Lee S. Sproull, Chap. 8, Computers in U.S. Households Since 1977.
• Thomas Haigh, "Computing the American Way: Contextualizing the Early US Computer Industry." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, April-June, 2010.
• Of course, Wikipedia covers all things computing and computer history: computer (definition); history of hardware; software; operating system.

Important Arguments by Major Founders of Contemporary Thinking about Computers, Technology, Information, and Intelligence

• Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind, 1950. (Open source version.)
  A seminal essay in Artificial Intelligence and models of computation, and the origin of the "Turing Test" concept for judging computer "intelligence." Turing is famous as the cryptographer who cracked the code for the German Enigma Machine in WWII.
  • See Wikipedia on "Turing Test," "Turing Machine," and "Alan Turing" for background, and articles on "Turing" and "Turning Machine" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • On the background history of code-breaking and the Enigma Machine.
  • On Turning as a philosopher, see Andrew Hodges, Turing (1997), online version of the "Turing Test" chapter here. (see other sources on this website).
• Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," Atlantic, July, 1945. (Additional authorized e-text version.)
  A seminal essay on managing information and human thought, leading to the concepts of GUIs (graphical user interface for computers), hypertext, and linked documents. See Wikipedia background.
  See background on Bush's concept of the "Memex," precursor to hypertext information systems.
  Video of a working model of the "Memex".
• Douglas Engelbart (Wikipedia background) developed Bush's concepts for computers: he is key inventor of the mouse and computer GUI.
  Douglas Engelbart's famous paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" (1962)
  Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" (1968): debut of the mouse and the structure of linked hypertext files. Video 1. Video 2 (documentary)
  Doug Engelbart Institute: archive of all work in Engelbart's research.
  The Stanford "Mouse Site," history and background of the mouse and computer GUIs.
  Doug Engelbart, The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart (book).
• Ted Nelson (Wikipedia background), coined the term "hypertext" in his seminal book, Literary Machines (1988;1991) (excerpts). Expanding on Engelbart's work, he developed the concept of user-based text connections across all documents. See Ted Nelson's site.
• Steven Pinker, Cognition, Language, Technology

Operating Systems and Interfaces

• Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999 and rev.)
• Douglas Engelbart, First Demo of the Mouse and GUI (1968).
• Lev Manovich, "The Database as a Genre of New Media." (1997)

Supplementary Reading:

• J. C. R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics,
  volume HFE-1, pages 4-11, March 1960. [Seminal essay in AI and networking; vision of an "internet" before the internet.
• Ray Kurzweil, on the Singularity, AI and Utopian Futurism
  Essay and editorial in The Futurist (2006).
  Wikipedia background (not fully vetted).
  Kurzweil, Key film and video presentations and interviews: 1 | 2
  Kurzweil's Singularity University | Video archive of lectures by scientists and engineers
  Kurzweil's forthcoming movie, The Singularity is Near

• Jaron Lanier, critique and discussion of issues techno-utopian beliefs:
  "One Half of a Manifesto" (Edge.org)
  "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" (edge.org)

Student Wiki Discussions

• For your wiki essay this week, find an aspect of the computer, computation technologies, or digital information that allows you to "de-black box" it by connecting some of the main relationships, dependencies, and conditions that enabled the computer and computing devices to have their power in our current "information age" (largely led by the US): in the related industries and institutions; policy and government funding; private investment and entrepreneurial culture; various states of the material technologies (hardware, and/or software); standards-making across institutions and manufacturers allowing development of markets and the creation of industry ecosystems; social conditions leading to the adoption of technologies, market conditions, and consumer uses. Try thinking "mediologically" in looking at the necessary contexts, conditions, and structures/systems of mediation and transmission (examples: government investment in the computer sector during and after WWII (especially IBM) and unregulated private development (leading to the PC); the transition from the business and government markets to "personal" computing markets; accelerated miniaturization, processing speed, and storage/memory required to converge to enable more complex PC software right down to current "smart" devices).

Learning Objectives:
What can a mediological analysis of the Net and Web open up for a newly visible analysis of forces usually blackboxed? With the convergence of telecommunications, computing, and digital media, the Internet and Web have subsumed our prior media into a new mediasphere, a system of ongoing reconfigurations of material technologies, software and algorithms, content, and the institutions and industries that create the "Internet" as such.

Using the Internet and Web as a paradigm of mediation and transmission issues: the significance of the convergence of all digital (digitized) media forms across a global network using common protocols and standards; the industry, policy and technology ecosystems that enable the Internet to function and grow with new innovations. Given that Internet protocols are "open" and standards based on industry collaboration and consensus (except in cases on monopoly dominance) and that networks are distributed systems with no one center, where are the real sources of power and authority?

Readings

History and Background of the Internet

• Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1998
• "A Brief History of the Internet," Internet Society. Other histories of the Internet on the Web.
  [Read around in these histories to get a basic sense of development.]
• Overview in Wikipedia
• Hobbes' Internet Timeline [good reference]
• Video: History of the Internet [not bad conceptual guide]

Philosophy of Internet Design and Architecture

• Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication." 1974, IEEE.
• David Clark, "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols," Originally published in Proc. SIGCOMM ‘88, Computer Communication Review Vol. 18, No. 4, August 1988, pp. 106–114.
  [This is a very useful article on the design philosophy of Internet Protocols, mostly accessible to non-engineering specialists.]
• The Internet Ecosystem (ISOC)

Architecture, Infrastructure, and Systems

• AT&T Internet Map
• Internet Backbone | Global Internet Exchange Points |
• Ben Mendelsohn, The Hidden Architecture of the Internet (New School, NYC, documentary)
• "The Cloud Factories," New York Times series on power use by Internet data centers.

The World Wide Web, HTML, and Interfaces to the Web

• Background history of hypertext and hypermedia (linking among files and documents)
• Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the Web (1989) (pdf)
• Ted Nelson, The Xanadu Project: First Hypertext System Model (this paper, 1999).
• Lev Manovich: "New Media from Borges to HTML." Introduction to The New Media Reader. Edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003, 13-25. (File from author’s site: www.manovich.net).

Background for a Mediological View of the Internet (Irvine)

Student Wiki Discussions: A mediological and ANT view of the Internet

• The Internet and all its subsystems provide on of the most complex systems for thinking about mediations, interdependencies, and agencies. Most people only see functions presented at the interface level--and an interface works by making itself invisible (by design and by our cultural expectations). The complexity of the computer and network architecture are invisible. For your writing, take a case--like an app or digital media type--and build out a complexity model of dependencies, histories of technological development, economic ecosystems, institutions of mediation (standards, policy and regulation, industry groups, patents?), markets and demographics?
• Questions: what is the difference between a "web browser" and an iPad app? Should we resist talking about "the Internet" as a reified, uniform "technology" and look to the variety of subsystems and subcomponents that must be orchestrated to work together? What does it mean to be "on the Internet"?

“I’ll begin with the following hypothesis: Society has been completely urbanized. This hypothesis implies a definition: An urban society is a society that results from a process of complete urbanization. This urbanization is virtual today, but will become real in the future.” (Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 1970:1)

This is Henri Lefebvre's opening statement in The Urban Revolution (1970), written at a time when over one third of the world’s population lived in cities or metropolitan regions; today more than one half of the world’s population is concentrated in cities and large metropolitan regions. Cities are the material, spatial, economic, technological, and social centers of the world, and the era of information technology and the Internet has not diminished the movement of concentration in urban areas, but instead has aided concentration or agglomeration. This week is devoted to considering some major aspects of the real spaces/places of cities and transformation through digital information, global networks, and re-concentrations of capital (all forms) in global informational cities.

Learning Objectives and Topics:
The City and/as Technology: Material Spaces and Global Networks
The City as architecture, infrastructure, nodes of communication and information.
Cities as concentrators and aggregators of technology.
Infrastructure: the "city of atoms" (materials and space) and the "city of bits" (the space of data and information flows, software and digital design, data centers, Internet and telecom switching centers).
The movement of people in, out, and through cities is information: human traffic flow in highways, transportation systems, streets, shopping centers, offices.

Readings:

Cities in Macro Globalization Views: Global City, World City, Megapolis

• Globalization and World Cities Research Network
• Saskia Sassen, "Global City: Strategic Site, New Frontier." American Studies, 41:2/3 (Summer/Fall 2000): 79-95.
• Saskia Sassen, "Locating Cities on Global Circuits." Environment & Urbanization, Vol 14 No 1 April 2002.

City, Space, Place, and Post-Digital Post-Internet Reconfigurations

• Michel De Certeau
  • From The Practice of Everyday Life (excerpts): "Walking in the City" and "Spatial Stories" [the sociology of lived experience in the city]
  • "The Imaginary of the City" (from De Certeau, Culture in the Plural, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997: 17-27) [Navigating the space of the city as messaging/communications system]
• Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (excerpts).
• William Hillier, Space is the Machine: A Configural Theory of Architecture. e-edition. Space Syntax Lab, London, 2004/2007. [Read chapters One, Four, and Ten].
• William Mitchell
  • City of Bits (excerpts)
  • Lecture and notes (video): "Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City" (MIT)

City Infrastructures and Visualizations

• MIT's SENSEable City Lab:
  • Lab Publications | SENSEable City Guide |
  • Wikicity: City as Real Time System
• Mixed Reality City project at Harvard's Metalab
• Zachary Schrag on the DC Metro | Schrag's web exhibition site on the building of DC metro

Space, Place, Networks and Digital Media & Art

• Mark Shepard, Sentient Cities Project (Ubiquitous Wireless Computing Environments)
• NASA Project: Bright Lights, Big City (satellite visualizations of earth's cities)
• Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), The Naru Elegies
• Adobe, Adobe Museum of Digital Media
• Google Art Project

Sites for Urban Studies Research

• University College, London: Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and School of Architecture and Space Syntax Laboratory
• MIT: SENSEable City Lab
• TripleCanopy Issue on Urbanisms: Model Cities | Master Plans

Student Project for Wiki Discussion

• Study a major neighborhood in Washington, DC for as many signs of the (1) the messaging system of the city and the meaning of built space and the styles and designs of architecture, (2) information flows with the movement of people and things, (3) visible and hidden/assumed infrastructure for utilities and communications in the daily use of technologies and media by people moving and working in the city. Choose one location: (1) intersection of 14th and U Streets, and 2-3 blocks in each direction from the intersection, (2) intersection of K Street and Connecticut Ave., and 2-3 blocks in each direction from the intersection, (3) the Washington Mall, from the Washington Monument to the Capitol Building, and views along the way. Where are people moving from/to? Road traffic, metro, walking? How many are using cell phones/smart devices? How many observable wireless Internet places/zones are there (coffee shops, bars, restaurants, more)?

Final Wiki Project Instructions