:STS and Information Technologies

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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?

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

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We will be reading from a variety of sources.  Many are available online. Those not otherwise available will be scanned and posted.

If you plan to work further in STS, the following are worth buying:

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.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  (About a lot more than the title implies.)

<more to come>

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The course changes with each offering, depending on what’s current in the field and the interests of the students enrolled, which tend to be an eclectic group.  The previous offering closest to what we’ll be doing is here.

The current, evoloving syllabus is here.

No pre-reqs, but not appropriate for undergrads (unless you can convince me otherwise).

TTh 2:00-3:30  in South Hall

Science and Technology Studies (STS) is an interdisciplinary field concerned with two areas of interest to us: the interaction between technology and the social; and knowledge communities.    Recent years have seen increased interaction between STS and human-computer interaction (HCI), information and communication technologies for development (ICTD), and new media.

This class will be a seminar emphasizing close reading and discussion of some classic STS works, along with more current research, emphasizing that which is relevant to information and computing technologies, and knowledge communities. Our concern will be with how these can help us understand the relationships among information technology and new media, especially design; knowledge communities; and the social.

Topics will depend in part on who’s in the class and people’s interests. Past years’ topics include Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Activity Theory, configuring users, epistemic cultures, situated action, reflective/critical HCI, and distributed cognition. Some of these topics are introduced in I203 but, of necessity, not in the depth.  In I212, we address how these topics are useful for understanding the relationships among information technology, design, and the social.  This course won’t help you get a job, but it may help you better understand what you are doing and why.

This class is open to any interested graduate student.  It is particularly appropriate for I-School PhD students; I-School master’s students interested in conceptual issues underlying some of their more applied coursework; and graduate students doing a new media emphasis, and from related departments.   Past students have been from departments as varied as architecture, mechanical engineering, and education.

Prof. Nancy Van House

vanhouse@ischool.berkeley.edu

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