Week 1 – 9/1: Introductions
- Cebula, Larry. “How to Read a Book in an Hour.” Northwest History, April 26, 2010. [Blog post]
Week 2 – 9/8: Looking Back
- Poe, Marshall T. A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Illustrated edition. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Week 3 – 9/15: Approaches I (History and Sociology)
- Marx, Leo. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Technology and Culture 51, no. 3 (2010): 561–77.
- Light, Jennifer S. “When Computers Were Women.” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 455–83.
- Kline, Ronald, and Trevor Pinch. “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States.” Technology and Culture 37, no. 4 (1996): 763–95.
- Johnson, Jim. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35, no. 3 (1988): 298–310.
Week 4 – 9/22: Approaches II (Anthropology, Politics, and Law)
- Coleman, E. Gabriella. “Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39, no. 1 (2010): 487–505.
- Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121–36.
- Lessig, Lawrence. “Code Is Law: On Liberty in Cyberspace.” Harvard Magazine, January 1, 2000.
Week 5 – 9/29: Approaches III (Intersectionality)
- Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2016, 3–90.
- Noble, Safiya Umoja. “Searching for Black Girls” in Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York, New York University Press, 2018, 64-109.
- Crawford, Kate. “Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem.” The New York Times, June 25, 2016.
Week 6 – 10/6: Issues I (Internet Culture)
- “The Cluetrain Manifesto.”
- O’Reilly, Tim. “What Is Web 2.0.” O’Reilly Media, September 30, 2005. [Blog post]
- Turner, Fred. “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production.” New Media & Society 11, no. 1–2 (February 1, 2009): 73–94.
- Marantz, Andrew. “Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience.” The New Yorker, August 16, 2019.
- Jonathan Zittrain, “The Internet Is Rotting.” The Atlantic, June 30, 2021.
Week 7 – 10/13: Issues II (Digital Business)
- Kenney, Martin, and John Zysman. “The Rise of the Platform Economy.” Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 2016.
- Benkler, Yochai. “Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power.” Daedalus 145, no. 1 (2016): 18–32.
- Nathan Heller. “Is the Gig Economy Working?” The New Yorker, May 16, 2017.
- Miriam Posner. “The Software That Shapes Workers’ Lives.” The New Yorker, March 12, 2019.
Week 8 – 10/20: Issues III (Social Media)
- Tufekci, Zeynep, and Christopher Wilson. “Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square.” Journal of Communication 62, no. 2 (2012): 363–79.
- Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. “Networked Privacy: How Teenagers Negotiate Context in Social Media.” New Media & Society 16, no. 7 (2014): 1051–67.
- Klein, Ezra. “How Technology Is Designed to Bring out the Worst in Us.” The Ezra Klein Show, February 19, 2018. [Podcast]
- Tufekci, Zeynep. “YouTube, the Great Radicalizer.” The New York Times, March 10, 2018.
Week 9 – 10/27
- No class: Individual Paper Meetings (by appointment)
Week 10 – 11/3: Views I
- Eggers, Dave. The Circle. Knopf, 2013. [Fiction]
Week 11 – 11/10: Views II
- Lynch, Michael P. The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data. New York: Liveright, 2016.
Week 12 – 11/17: Views III
- Her. 2014. [Film]
- White Christmas. Black Mirror. 2014 [Television]
Week 13 – 11/24
- No Class – Thanksgiving
Week 14 – 12/1: Looking Ahead
- “Why a Dawn of Technological Optimism Is Breaking.” The Economist, January 16, 2021. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/01/16/why-a-dawn-of-technological-optimism-is-breaking.
Week 15 – 12/8
- No Class – Papers Due Friday 12/10