Syllabus

[See bcourse for more details]

01/21 Introduction
THEME 1: TECHNOLOGY
01/23 Why Are We Here?
Brown, John Seely & Paul Duguid. 2000. “Introduction: Tunneling AheadThe Social Life of Information. (republished in First Monday 5(4 April).
Brown, John Seely & Paul Duguid. 2000. “Limits to Information.” Chapter 2 of The Social Life of Information. (republished in First Monday 5(4 April).
optional reading: Andrew Keen, “The Cult of the Social
 01/28  What Is Technology?
Marx, Leo. 2010. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Technology and Culture, 51(3): 561-77
Kline, Ronald R.. 2006. “Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Polity: The Emergence of ‘Information Technology’ as a Keyword, 1948-1985,” Technology & Society.
optional reading: Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)
optional reading: Harold J. Leavitt & Thomas L. Whisler ‘Management in the 1890s,” Harvard Business Review 36(6)(1958): 41-48.
 01/30 Technology and Determinism
Kelly, Kevin. 2010. “My Question” & “Playing the Infinite Game,” pp. 1-17 and 347-361 in What Technology Wants. New York: Viking.
Heilbroner, Robert L. 1994. “Do Machines Make History?” pp: 53-65 in Merrit Roe Smith & Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
optional reading: Lanier, Jaron. 2010. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
optional reading: MacKenzie, Donald. 1984. “Marx and the Machine,Technology and Culture 25(3): 473-502.
 02/04 NO CLASS – FIRST ASSIGNMENT DUE
 02/06 Debating Determinism
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. “Preface to Third Printing,” “Introduction,” & “The Medium is the Message” pp. v-x & 3-21 in Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Williams, Raymond. 1974. “Technology and the Society,” & “Effects of the Technology and its Uses,” pp. 9-32 and 119-134 in Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken Books.
optional reading: Gardner, Howard, & Katie Davis. 2013. The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
PAUSE: READING AND WRITING
02/11 Reading and Writing
Critical Reading Strategies,” Salisbury University
Keshav, S. “How to Read a Paper.” University of Waterloo
Hammering the Prose: An Academic Guide to Writing Essays
 02/13  205 instead of 203
THEME 2: INFORMATION
 02/18 Information
Shannon, Claude. 1948. “The Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. [Bell Labs][Read to Appendix 1, p.27]
Carey, James W. 1989. A Cultural Approach to Communication, pp. 13-36 in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
optional reading: Nunberg, Geoffrey.”Farewell to the Information Age,” in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

optional reading: Shannon, Claude. 1956. “The Bandwagon,IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2 (March): 3.
THEME 3: INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL
 2/20 Double Session to make up for 02/13
First part (9:30-11):
Economic Individual and Rational Choice
Lazear, Edward P.. 2000. “Economic Imperialism,Quarterly Journal of Economics 115(1-Feb): 99-146.
Kelly, Kevin. 1997. “New Rules for the New Economy: Twelve Dependable Principles for Thriving in a Turbulent World,Wired, 5.09:
  optional reading: Chetty, Raj. 2013. “Yes, Economics Is a Science,New York Times. Oct 20.
  optional reading: [Letters in response to Chetty]. 2013. “Is Economics a Science? It’s a Tricky Question,New York Times, Oct 27
  optional reading: Surowiecki, James. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. New York: Doubleday.
optional reading: Mackenzie, Donald. 2006. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Second part (12:30-2):
Individual versus Collective
Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,Science 162(1968): 1243-1248.
Elinor Ostrom. 2011. “Reflections on the Commons,” pp. 1-27 in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press.
optional reading: Fourcade, Marion & Kieran Healy. 2007. “Moral Views of Market Society,Annual Reviews of Sociology, 33: 285-311.
optional reading: Akerlof, George A. 1970. “The Market for Lemons: Quality, Uncertainty, and the Market Mechanism,Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84: 488-500.
PAUSE: METHODS I
 02/25 Quantitative Methods
THEME 3: INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL/ Continued
 02/27 Individual, Community, Social
Rheingold, Howard. 2000. “Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place” & “Disinformocracy,” pp. 226-300 in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dijck, José van. 2013. Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity & “The Ecosystem of Connective Media, Lock In, Fence Off, Opt Out? ” pp. 1-18 and 154-176, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New York: Oxford University Press.
optional reading: Donath, J. (1997) Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. In P. Kollock and M. Smith (Eds). Communities in Cyberspace. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 
SECOND ASSIGNMENT DUE
 03/04 205 instead of 203
 03/06 Social versus Technological
Ackerman, Mark S. 2000. “The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility,” Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2-3) 181-203.
THEME 4: INFORMATION, INNOVATION, TECHNOLOGY
 03/11 Double Session to make up for 03/04
First Part (9:30-11): Material Matters
Gibson, James J. 1986. “The Theory of Affordances” pp. 127-143 in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Sellen, Abigail, & Richard H.R. Harper. 2002. “Paper in support of working together,” pp 107-137 in The Myth of the Paperless Office. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
optional reading: Stroud, Max. 2013. “The Dream and Myth of the Paperless City.
optional reading: Auletta, Ken. 2013 “Freedom of Information.New Yorker, October 7.
optional reading: Shirky, Clay. 2009. “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.
optional reading: Brown, John S. and Paul Duguid 1994. “Borderline Issues: Social and Material Aspects of Design.Human–Computer Interaction 9 (1), pp. 3–36.
PAUSE: METHODS II
Second Part (12:30-2): Qualitative Methods
Becker, H. S. 1996. “The Epistemology of Qualitative Research,” pp. 53-71 in R. Jessor, A. Colby, & R. Schweder, eds., Ethnography and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Enquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 03/13 Methods: Design
THEME 4: INFORMATION, INNOVATION, AND TECHNOLOGY / Continued
 03/18 Material Politics
Winner, Langdon. 1980. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” Daedalus, 109 (1): 121-136.
Nissenbaum, Helen. 2001. “How Computer Systems Embody Values,” Computer 34(3): 117-119.
 03/20 Material Networks
Latour, Bruno. 1992. “Where are the Missing Masses?: The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” pp: 225-258 in Wiebe E. Bijker and John. Law, ed., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [ebook]

Ribes, David, Steve Jackson, R. Stuart Geiger, Matthew Burton, and Thomas Finholt. 2013. “Artifacts That Organize: Delegation in the Distributed Organization.” Information and Organization, 23(1), 1-14.

Geiger, R. Stuart and Ribes, David. (2010). “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal.” In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2010). New York: ACM Press.

optional reading: Law, John. 1992. “Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity,” Systems Practice 5, 379-393.
THIRD ASSIGNMENT DUE
 03/25 SPRING BREAK
 03/27 SPRING BREAK
 04/01 Innovation and Diffusion
Rogers, E. 2010. “Introduction,” pp: 1-38 in E. Rogers, ed., Diffusion of Innovations. 5th Edition. New York: Free Press.
Kline, Ronald, and Trevor Pinch. 1996. “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture, 37(4): 763-795.
optional reading: Wiebe E. Bijker, 1995. “King of the Road: The Social Construction of the Safety Bicycle,” pp. 29-100 in Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
PAUSE: METHODS III
 04/03 History as Method
Cowan, Ruth S. 2010. “Looking Back in Order to Move Forward: John McDemott, ‘Technology, The Opiate of the Intellectuals,'” Technology & Culture 51(1)(2010): 199-215.
THEME 5: INFORMATION, INNOVATION, ORGANIZATION, AND NETWORKS
 04/08 Case Histories: Telegraph and Telephone
John, Richard R. 2010. “Making a Neighborhood of a Nation,” and “Mr. Morse’s Lightening,” pp. 1-64 in Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. [ebook]
 OR
Fischer, Claude S. 1992. Technology and Modern Life, “The Telephone in America,” & “Educating the Public,” pp. 1-85 in America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone. Berkeley: U.C. Press. [ebook]
optional reading: McChesney, Robert, 2013. Digital Disconnect. New York: New Press. 
optional reading: Wu, Tim. 2010. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Knopf. 
optional reading: Beauchamp, Christopher. 2010. ‘Who Invented the Telephone?: Lawyers, Patents, and the Judgement of History,’ Technology & Culture, 51(4): 854-78.
 04/10 Case Histories: Internet
Abbate, Janet. 1999. “White Heat and Cold War: The Origins and Meanings of Packet Switching.” Chapter 1 in Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 04/15 Rational Choice: Firm or Market?
Coase, R.H. 1937. “The Nature of the Firm,Economica, NS 4(16): 386-405.
Richardson, G.B.. 1972. “The Organisation of Industry,The Economic Journal, 82(327): 883-896. 

optional reading: Hayek, Fredrich. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society,American Economic Review, 35 (September): 519-30. 

optional reading: Brown, John & Paul Duguid. 1998. “Organizing Knowledge,” California Management Review 40(3)
 04/17 Organization and Peer Production
Benkler, Yochai. 2003-3. “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Review, 112: 369-446.
Simonite, Tom. 2013. “The Decline of Wikipedia.” MIT Technology Review. Oct 22.
optional reading: Duguid, Paul. 2006. “Limits of Self-Organization: Peer Production and “Laws of Quality,” First Monday 11(10).
optional reading: Takhteyev, Yuri. 2012. Coding Places: Software Practice in a South American City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
THEME 6: SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY OF TECHNOLOGY
 04/22 A Flat World?
Saxenian, AnnaLee. 1996. “Introduction: Local Industrial Systems” pp. 1-10 in Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sun, H. 2012. “Approaching Culture in Cross-Cultural Technology Design” chapter 1 in Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 
Sun, H. 2009 “The Triumph of Users: Achieving Cultural Usability Goals With User Localization”, Technical Communication Quarterly 15(4): 457-481.
Mirchandani, K. 2004. “Practices of Global Capital: Gaps, Cracks and Ironies in Transnational Call Centres in India,” Global Networks. 4(4): 355-373.
optional reading: Romer, Paul. 1993. “Idea Gaps and Object Gaps in Economic Development,” Journal of Monetary Economics, 32(3): 543-573.
 04/24 Evening Things Out?
Cockburn, Cynthia. 2004. “The Circuit of Technology: Gender, Identity, and Power,” pp. 18-25 in Eric Hirsch & Roger Silverstone, eds., Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. London: Routledge.
Kuriyan, Renee & Kathi R. Kitner. 2009. “Constructing Class Boundaries: Gender, Aspirations, and Shared Computing,” Information Technologies and International Development, 5(1): 17-29.
Toyoma, Kentaro. 2013. “Reflections on HCI for Development,” Interactions, Nov-Dec: 64-67.
Hargittai, Eszter. 2008. “The Digital Reproduction of Inequality,” pp. 936–944 in Social Stratification, edited by David Grusky. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Cushing, Ellen. “Amazon Mechanical Turk: The Digital Sweatshop.” Utne Reader
Novek, J. 2002. “IT, Gender, and Professional Practice: Or, Why an Automated Drug Distribution system was Sent Back to the Manufacturer,” Science, Technology & Human Values 27(3), 379-403.
FOURTH ASSIGNMENT DUE
THEME 7: INFORMATION, SOCIETY, AND SOCIAL PROTEST
 04/29 Technology and Politics
Morozov, Evegny. 2013. “Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley,” Frankfurter Allgemeine. 11.11.
Karpf, David. 2012. “The New Generation of Political Advocacy groups,” chapter 1 in The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. New York: Oxford University Press.
 05/01 Wrap
 05/15 FINAL PAPER DUE