Imagining the Future

The Politics and Possibilities of Emerging Information Technology

Duke University Literature Seminar 20.3

Ted Friedman, Instructor

Introduction / Logistics / Syllabus / Assignments / Links / Newsgroup / E-Mail Ted

Syllabus

Books are available at the Regulator. The following books are required:

  • Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash
  • William Gibson, Neuromancer
  • Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
  • Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
  • Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2
  • Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
    •  In addition, the class will jointly choose one other book to read for the final week.

    For some assignments I will ask you to surf a given topic rather than give you a specific reading. For these assignments I'll expect you to start from the class Links page, browse for a while, then use your own judgment to decide what looks most interesting to look at in depth. You'll be expected to report back what you've learned to the class, and to share useful URLs. Browsing, by the way, should be done with the latest version of Netscape, unless somebody else builds a better browser before the end of the semester.

    Videos will be screened at times to be scheduled, and will also be on reserve at Lilly.

    Multimedia software will also be on reserve at Lilly when needed.

    Contents

    Unit I: Where Are We?

  • Week 1: Where Are We Now?
  • Week 2: What Does the Future Look Like These Days? Snowcrash vs. Star Trek
  • Week 3: What Should the Future Look Like?
    •

    Unit II: How Did We Get Here?

  • Week 4: A Step Back - Historicizing Cyberspace
  • Week 5: A Step Further Back - Historicizing Information Technology
  • Week 6: Return to the 80s - How Did Cyberpunk Get Invented?
    •

    Unit III: Back to the Future: Topics in Cyber-Subjectivity

  • Week 7: The Wired Self
  • Week 8: Virtual Community and Personal Fluidity
  • Week 9: Synthesizing Humanity
    •

    Unit IV: InfoPolitics

  • Week 10: Information as a Commodity
  • Week 11: Access and Ownership
  • Week 12: The Wired Workplace
  • Week 13: Virtual Democracy?
    •

    Unit V: Where Do We Go From Here?

  • Week 14: Imagining Futures We Can Live In
    •

    Unit I: Where Are We?

    Week 1: Where are we now?

    M Jan 15 Introduction - Where Do You Want to Go Today?

  • Handout: Nielsen demographic survey of the World Wide Web
    •

    W Jan 17 The state of the Net

  • Amy Cortese, "The Software Revolution," from Business Week, Dec. 4, 1995.
  • Kevin Maney, "The Mythical Compuphonavision Set," from Megamedia Shakeout (Wiley, 1995), pp. 33-57.
  • Steven Levy, "The Year of the Internet," from Newsweek, Dec. 25, 1995.
  • John Heilmann, "The Making of the President 2000," from Wired, December, 1995.
  • Multimedia: Browse the Web. Try Java, VRML, and other new extensions if you can.
    •

    Week 2: What Does the Future Look Like These Days? Snowcrash vs. Star Trek

    M Jan 22 The Hacker Ideal

  • Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash (Bantam Spectra, 1992).
    •

    W Jan 24 The Communitarian Fantasy

  • Henry Jenkins, "'Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations' - Genre and Authorship in Star Trek," from John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Dr. Who and Star Trek (Routledge, 1995).
  • Video: Episode of Star Trek: TNG
    •

    Week 3: What Should the Future Look Like? Techno-Utopians, Neo-Luddites, and Others

    M Jan 29 Wired or tired?

  • Scenarios: Special Wired Edition (1.01)
  • James Brook and Ian Boal, "Prologue," and Ian Boal, "A Flow of Monsters: Luddism and Virtual Technologies," from Brook and Boal, eds., Resisting the Virtual Life (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), pp. vii-xv, 3-15.
  • Theodore Roszak, "In Defense of the Naked Mind: Introduction to the Second Edition," from The Cult of Information (U Cal Press, 1994), pp. xvii-xlvii.
    •

    W Jan 31 Where else could we be?

  • Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Routledge, 1991).
  • Richard E. Sclove, "Making Technology Democratic," from Resisting the Virtual Future, pp. 85-104.
    •

    Unit II: How Did We Get Here?

    Week 4: A Step Back: Historicizing Cyberspace

    M Feb 5 Why historicize?

  • William Gibson, "The Gernsbach Contiuum," from Bruce Sterling, ed., Mirrorshades (Ace, 1986), pp. 1-11.
  • Andrew Ross, "Getting Out of the Gernsbach Continuum," from Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (Routledge, 1992), pp. 101-136.
    •

    W Feb 7 Some Net history

  • Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," from The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945.
  • Gary Wolf, "The Curse of Xanadu," from Wired 3.06
  • Howard Rheingold, "Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net," from The Virtual Community (Addison-Wesley, 1993), pp. 65-109.
    •

    Week 5: A Step Further Back: Historicizing Information Technology

    M Feb 12 The Wiring of America: Two Examples

  • David Nye, "What Was Electricity?" from Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (MIT, 1990), pp. 139-184.
  • Claude Fisher, "Technology and Modern Life" and "Personal Calls, Personal Meanings," from America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone (U Cal, 1992), pp. 1-32, 222-254
    •

    W Feb 14 Imagining the Information Infrastructure: Networks of conspiracy

  • Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Harper & Row, 1966)
    •

    Week 6: Return to the '80s: How Did Cyberpunk Get Invented?

    M Feb 19 The Invention of Cyberspace

  • William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace, 1984)
    •

    W Feb 21 The Canonization of Cyberpunk

  • Interview with Gibson by Larry McCaffery, in McCaffery, ed., Storming the Reality Studio (Duke Press, 1991)
  • Bruce Sterling, introduction to Mirrorshades, pp. ix-xiv.
  • Sterling, "Cyberpunk in the Nineties"
  • Video: Blade Runner
    •

    Unit III: Back to the Future -

    Topics in Cyber-subjectivity

    Week 7: The Wired Self

    M Feb 26

  • Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game(Tor, 19tk)
    •

    W Feb 28

  • Ted Friedman,"Making Sense of Software," from Steve Jones, ed., Cybersociety (Sage, 1995), pp. 73-89.
  • Multimedia: Play a computer game
    •

    Week 8: Virtual Community and Personal Fluidity

    M Mar 4

  • Benedict Anderson, "Cultural Roots," from Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983/91), pp. 9-36.
  • Steve Jones, "Imagining Community in the Information Age," from Cybersociety, pp. 10-35.
  • Sherry Turkle, "Identity in the Age of Internet," from Life on the Screen (Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 9-26
    •

    W Mar 6

  • Surf writings on Usenet, MOOs, and other Internet communities.
  • Multimedia: Explore an IRC channel, a Usenet group, a MOO, and an avatar-based site.
    •  Spring Break - No class March 11, 13

    Week 9: Synthesizing Humanity

    M Mar 18

  • Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2
    •

    W Mar 20

  • Surf information on artificial intelligence
    •

    Unit IV: InfoPolitics

    Week 10: Information as a Commodity

    M Mar 25 The Information Economy

  • David Harvey, "The Political-Economic Transformation of Late Twentieth-Century Capitalism," from The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1990), pp. 121-200.
  • Stuart Brand, "The Politics of Broadcatch," from The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (Penguin, 1987), pp. 201-228.
  • Mark Poster, "Introduction: Words Without Things," form The Mode of Information (U Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 1-20.
  • Doug Henwood, "Info Fetishism," from Resisting the Virtual Life, pp. 163-172.
    •

    W Mar 27 Digicash and Future of Online Exchange

  • Surf information on digital cash and online transactions
    •

    Week 11: Access and Ownership

    Mon Apr 1 Online Intellectual Property and the Slow Death of the Author

  • Michel Foucault, "The Death of the Author"
  • Martha Woodmansee, "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author'," from Eighteenth-Century Studies 17:4 (Summer, 1984), pp. 425-448.
  • Anne Branscomb, "Introduction: Control of the Legal Infostructure," and "Who Owns Computer Software?" from Who Owns Information? (Basic Books, 1994), pp. 1-8, 138-158.
  • Pamela Samuelson, "The Copyright Grab," Wired 4.01
    •

    Wed Apr 3 Censorship Debates

  • Ithiel de Sola Pool, "Broadcasting and the First Amendment," from Technologies of Freedom (Harvard, 1983), pp. 108-150.
  • Surf for information on PGP, the Clipper chip, telecommunications regulations and the Exon amendment.
    •

    Week 12: The Wired Workplace

    M Apr 8 Life With billg and the Entrepreneurial Ideal

  • Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
    •

    W Apr 10 Other Gigs

  • Ellen Ullman, "Out of Time: Reflections on a Programming Life," from Resisting the Virtual Life, pp. 131-144.
  • Langdon Winner, "Silicon Valley Mystery House," from Michael Sorkin, ed., Variation on a Theme Park.
  • Stanley Aronowitz, "Technology and the Future of Work," from Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckrey, eds., Culture on the Brink (Bay Press, 1994), pp. 15-30.
    •

    Week 13: Virtual Democracy?

    M Apr 15

  • Readings to be announced. (I haven't come up with many good readings on this topic yet, but trust me, you'll be hearing a lot about campaiging on the Internet as the primaries heat up.)
    •

    W Apr 17

  • Surf Presidential campaign sites
    •

    Unit V: Where Do We Go from Here?

    Week 14: Imagining Futures We Can Live In

    M Apr 22

  • SF novel to be chosen by class
    •

    W Apr 24

  • Surfings to be chosen by class
    •

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