:STS and Information Technologies

If I don’t know who you are, I’ll remove you. So don’t bother registering unless you have checked with me.

Comments Off on Registering for this Blog

These are the responses I got:

Jasanoff-style policy
Gender/Donna Haraway/Feminist STS
Visualization
Reflective / Critical HCI
User Technology Relationships
Social Construction of Technology (SCOT)
Representation and Visualization
Situated Action
Knowledge Communities
Actor-Network Theory

These are all major topics that we would cover anyway, with two exceptions. Policy is a big area and one I don’t know well.  Situated Action is a theoretical approach that we probably cannot do justice, but we can start.  That’s not to say that we won’t cover them — we can — but not in depth.

Comments Off on Topics That Have Been Named as Particularly Interesting

The readings that aren’t online have been emailed to the class email list.

Comments Off on Readings emailed

Readings: Articles from journals are available via the campus library.  If you’re connecting from off-campus, you need to set up your browser appropriately. Other readings will be scanned and made available.

Email list: If you registered for the course before the first meeting, you’re on the class email list. If you’re not on the list, add yourself. iSchool students know how to do this via intranet. Others: email majordomo@ischool; “subscribe i212. Anything you send to i212@ischool will go to everyone on the list.

Office hours: I will set office hours, but I’m very open to emailed questions and comments, or to setting up appointments outside of office hours.

Course blog: If you registered for the course ahead of time, you have also been added to the blog as a user. You can post to the blog. Your default userid is first inital last name. I suggest you subscribe to the blog via RSS feed or something like it.

Comments Off on If You’re New to Campus and/or the iSchool – Random Info

Mostly we’ll read from a variety of sources. However, the following will be useful. None are in the bookstore; they’re easy to order online.

Please BUY: Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  University Press Books on Bancroft may have a couple of copies in stock. You won’t need it immediately, but soon.

If you aren’t familiar with STS the following is useful — I’m not requiring that you buy it but you’ll find it worthwhile: Sismondo, S. (2010). An introduction to science and technology studies (2nd ed.). Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. (Be sure you get 2nd ed.)

Finally, if you’re serious about STS, you’ll want to have this: Hackett, E. J., & Society for Social Studies of Science. (2008). The handbook of science and technology studies (3rd ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press : Published in cooperation with the Society for the Social Studies of Science.  It can be bought as an e-book from the MIT Press site. Again, be sure you get the latest edition.

Comments Off on Textbooks

Read here.

Comments Off on About this course

If you have registered for this course,  you should be added to the class email list automatically, soon. (Just checked and that hasn’t happened yet.)

If you haven’t registered, but want to be on the list, or if you want to add yourself  manually to be sure you’re added ASAP:

I-school students know how to do this on the Internet.

Other students: send e-mail to majordomo@ischool.berkeley.edu with the message “subscribe i212.”

Comments Off on Class Email List

We may use the current UK riots as a recurring case study this semester.  They raise several topics relevant to this course, and give us a concrete, real-world case to interpret through our more theoretical readings.

• These riots are surfacing sociotechnical networks — what are we seeing?  How does an event like this make apparent what’s otherwise invisible?
• What’s the role of technology?  Twitter, Facebook, and especially Blackberries?  Why is Blackberry suddenly at the center of these discussions:  Blackberries and the Blackberry Messenger service.
• The UK government is talking about cutting off Twitter and Blackberry Messenger as a way of preventing riots.  Technological determinism run amuck, or a wise crowd control strategy?
• Everyone is debating why these riots are happening. For our purposes, a key question is how the rioters have come to the shared understanding to take action, including by not exclusively via social networking.  If enough people are doing the same thing at the same time, they can overwhelm the police.  But how does this shared understanding come about?

Comments Off on Technology, Shared Understandings, and the UK Riots?

The list of pages/topics down the side of this website is long and growing.  We are not going to address all these topics — this list is mostly potential topics.  Whether some make it into the final syllabus will depend on who’s in the class.  The other value of this list is to show you what kinds of topics have been and can be addressed within an STS framework — you may be surprised to find something of interest to you, or related to your primary interests; or one of these may suggest to you something you want to address.

Comments Off on All Those Topics!

Evolving syllabus is this page.  I’ll be updating this continually.  Check back often if you want to know what we’ll be doing.

Comments Off on Syllabus