From the first attempts at pressing symbols into clay, to the latest software available on the Net, our efforts to communicate, share our culture, and drive social agendas have depended on the tools we've developed for getting our ideas to others. However, our commonplace notions of communication and media regularly overlook the role of the material technologies that are so crucial to them. Yet our beliefs as to how and why we communicate have shaped the technologies we design; in turn, those technologies have shaped our efforts to communicate, and the consequences of those efforts. This course will consider the technologies of media -- including writing, printing, photography, film, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and computer networks -- as an opportunity to think about the intersection of technology and its social context.

Course Requirements:

The most important assignment is to complete all of the readingassigned; comprehension of the arguments is crucial to your success in this course. There will be three short papers (3-4 pp. each, 20% of grade each) during the semester that will ask you to consider specific questions dealt with in the course. The final paper (7-10 pp., 40% of grade) will require students to draw from the materials of the course to make an argument about the nature of digital media and some of its implications for American culture. Further explanation of these assignments will be provided in class.

Materials:

There is one required book for the course, available at the Cornell bookstore:

• Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2001)

Although it is not required, I encourage you to be reading the popular press regularly; choose one that covers news of current technology and culture: the New York Times"technology and business" section, Wired or Wired News, Salon.com, etc.

Thursday, August 29 -- introduction

Tuesday, September 3 -- technological determinism

BRIGGS + BURKE, ch 1 (pp. 1-14)
Merritt Roe Smith, "Technological Determinism in American Culture" in Smith and Marx eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, pp. 1-35

Thursday, September 5 -- alternatives to technological determinism

Steve Woolgar, "Technologies as Cultural Artefacts" in Dutton, ed., Information and Communication Technologies: Visions and Realities, pp. 87-102
Bryan Pfaffenberger, "Fetishized Objects and Humanized Natures: Towards an anthropology of technology" Man 23(2) 1988, pp. 236-252

Tuesday, September 10 -- technologies of representation and human cognition

Denise Schmandt-Besserat, "The Earliest Precursor of Writing" Scientific American v238n6, pp. 50-58
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild,
         excerpt from ch 2 ("Navigation as Computation") -->pp. 95-116
Michael Cole, Cultural Psychology, ch 5 ("Putting Culture in the Middle", pp. 116-145)

Thursday, September 12 -- the "print revolution"

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, ch 6 ("Western Christendom disrupted: resetting the stage for the Reformation", pp. 148-186)
Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands", Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present v6 pp. 1-40

Tuesday, September 17 -- questioning the consequences of print

BRIGGS + BURKE, ch 2 (pp. 15-73)

Thursday, September 19 -- maps and the power of the image

Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images ch 3 ("A New World-Picture: Maps as Capital Goods for the Modern World System", pp. 79-130)

Tuesday, September 24 -- books and social power

Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, ch 9 ("The Shape of the Book", pp. 125-147)
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book,          from ch 2 ("Literatory Life") pp. 58-107, 160-186

Thursday, September 26 -- political revolution and "the public sphere"

BRIGGS + BURKE, ch 3 (pp. 74-105), excerpt from ch 6 (pp. 188-216)

Tuesday, October 1 -- newspapers and democracy

Michael Schudson, Discovering the News, ch 1 ("The Revolution in American Journalism in the Age of Egalitarianism: The Penny Press", pp. 12-60)
Howard Tumber, "Democracy in the Information Age: The Role of the Fourth Estate in cyberspace" Frank Webster, ed., Culture and Politics in the Information Age: A New Politics?, pp. 17-31

** PAPER #1 DUE **

Thursday, October 3

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ch 10 ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", pp. 217-251)
Marshall McCluhan, Understanding Media
         ch 2 ("Media Hot and Cold" pp. 22-32)
         ch 5 ("Hybrid Energy", pp. 48-55)

Tuesday, October 8

Herbert Schiller, Mass Communications and the American Empire, ch 1 ("Electronics and Economics Serving an American Century", pp. 45-62)

James Carey, Communication as Culture, ch 1 ("A Cultural Approach to Communication", pp. 13- 36)

Thursday, October 10

Howard Becker,Art Worlds
         from ch 1 ("Art Worlds") -->pp. 1-6, 34-39
         from ch 3 ("Mobilizing Resources") -->pp. 68-92
Donald Norman, Things That Make Us Smart, ch 3 ("The Power of Representation", pp. 43-75)

Tuesday, October 15 -- FALL BREAK

Thursday, October 17 -- electricity, contact, power over distance

BRIGGS + BURKE, ch 4 (pp. 106-120), ch 5 (pp. 121-188)

Tuesday, October 22 -- telegraph, telephone, and the communication industries

Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind, ch 1 ("Lightning Lines and the Birth of Modern Communication, 1838-1900", pp. 3-29)
David Nye, "Shaping Communication Networks: Telegraph, Telephone, Computer" Social Research v64n3 pp. 1067-1091

Thursday, October 24 -- radio and cultural participation

BRIGGS + BURKE, excerpt from ch 6 (pp. 216-233)
Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination,
         ch 3 ("Exploratory Listening in the 1920s", pp. 55-82)
         ch 10 ("The FM Revolution", pp. 256-283)

Tuesday, October 29 -- popular music and the "intrusion" of technology

Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction" Critical Quarterly v30n3 pp. 34-49
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, ch 3 ("Soul Sonic Forces: Technology, Orality, and Black Cultural Practices in Hip Hop", pp. 62-97)

** PAPER #2 DUE **

Thursday, October 31 -- photography "capturing the real"

Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middlebrow Art,
         from ch 2 ("The Social Definition of Photography") -->pp. 73-77
         from ch 1 ("The Cult of Unity and Cultivated Differences") -->pp. 19-39
Bill Jay, "The Photographer as Aggressor" in David Featherstone, ed., Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography, pp. 7-23
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation, ch 3 ("A Means of Surveillance: the Photograph as Evidence in Law", pp. 66-103)

Tuesday, November 5 -- film portraying us to ourselves

W. Bernard Carlson, "Artifacts and Frames of Meaning: Thomas A. Edison, His Managers, and the Cultural Construction of Motion Pictures" in Weibe Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology / Building Society, pp. 175-200
Lary May, Screening Out the Past, ch 6 ("You Are the Star: The Evolution of the Theater Palace, 1908-1929", pp. 147-166)
Jean-Louis Commoli, "Machines of the Visible" in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus, pp. 121-142

Thursday, November 7 -- animation: bringing images to life

Kristin Thompson, "Implications of the Cel Animation Technique" in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus, pp. 106-120
Norman Klein, Seven Minutes,
         ch 7 ("Machina Versatilis: How the Cartoon Pays Homage to the Machine", pp. 75-80)
         ch 13 ("Full Animation: Putting Clouds into Exterior Scenes", pp. 146-155)

Tuesday, November 12 -- the value of television

BRIGGS + BURKE, excerpt from ch 6 (pp. 233-266)
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, ch 1 ("The Technology and the Society", pp. 9-31)
Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch, "Television as a Cultural Forum" in Horace Newcomb, ed., Television: The Critical View, 6th ed., pp. 561-573

Thursday, November 14 -- television in everyday life

David Morley, Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies, ch 9 w/ Roger Silverstone ("Domestic Communication: Technologies and Meanings", pp. 201-212)
Cecilia Tichi, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture, ch 2 ("Electronic Hearth", pp. 42-61)

Tuesday, November 19 -- computers and the digital

BRIGGS + BURKE, ch 7 (pp. 267-319)

** PAPER #3 DUE **

Thursday, November 21 -- the mythology of the Net

Paul Edwards, The Closed World, ch 2 ("Why Build Computers?: The Military Role in Computer Research", pp. 43-74)
Robert McChesney, "So Much for the Magic of Technology and the Free Market" in Herman and Swiss, eds., The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, pp. 5-35.
Rob Kling, Computerization and Controversy, excerpt from ch 1 ("Heads Up! Mental Models for Traveling through the Computer World") -->pp. 10-25

Tuesday, November 26 -- the Internet and the user

Woolgar, Steve, "Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials" in John Law, ed., A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination
Phil Agre, "Hazards of Design"
         http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/hazards.html
Lucas Introna and Helen Nissenbaum, "Defining the Web: The Politics of Search Engines" IEEE Computer, January 2000, pp. 54-62

Thursday, November 28 -- THANKSGIVING

Tuesday, December 3 -- digital technology and the regulation of practice

Lawrence Lessig, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace,
         ch 5 ("Regulating Code", pp. 43-60)
         ch 7 ("What Things Regulate", pp. 85-99)
Andrew Shapiro, The Control Revolution, ch 8 ("Where Do You Want to Go Today? Microsoft and the Illusion of Control", pp. 84-101)
Farhad Manjoo, "Can We Trust Palladium?" Salon, July 11, 2002
         http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/07/11/palladium/print.html
Pete Rojas, "Bootleg Culture" Salon, August 1, 2002
         http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/01/bootlegs/print.html

Thursday, December 5 -- conclusion: visions of the future

Philip K Dick, "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" in Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
John Barnes, excerpt from Mother of Storms --- not in the reader; will be provided in class ---
Richard Sclove, "Making Technology Democratic" in Iain Boal, ed., Resisting the Virtual Life, pp. 85-101

** final research paper due during exam week. **