e-mail: tlg28@cornell.edu
office hours: Mon 2:30-4:30 pm -- 305 Rockefeller
This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to technologies of communication, in order to develop theoretical concepts that illuminate the intersection of technology, knowledge, power, and society. We will attempt to apply ideas developed inside of S&TS to a set of artifacts it has less often scrutinized; and we will draw from fields outside of S&TS to seek out and identify work that has dealt intelligently with the material dimensions of communication.
A 5000-word term paper will be due during exam week; this paper may either be a portion of your ongoing research that depends on materials and issues raised in this course, or be a synthesis of some of the issues encountered in the course and their place within the larger field of S&TS and related intellectual inquiry. A modest proposal and title for your paper will be due April 16th; in that class, each student will briefly discuss their plans for the paper with the rest of the class, so that we can collectively offer feedback and guidance.
Jan 22: introduction
Jan 29: STS on representation
Svetlana Alpers, "'Ut pictura, ita visio': Kepler's Model of the Eye and the Nature of Picturing in the North" and "The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art" The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century [26-71, 119-168]
Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands", Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present v6 [1-40]
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "Image of Objectivity" Representations v40 [81-128]
http://resolver.library.cornell.edu/jsto/abf3790
Lynch, Michael, "Representation is overrated: Some critical remarks about the use of the concept of representation in science studies," Configurations, v2 n1 [137-49]
http://muse.jhu.edu:80/journals/configurations/v002/2.1lynch.html
Donna Haraway, "A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies" Configurations, v2 n1 [59-71]
http://muse.jhu.edu:80/journals/configurations/v002/2.1haraway.html
Feb 5: STS on media technologies
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, [175-200]
Cynthia Cockburn, "The Material of Male Power" in MacKenzie + Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology [177-198]
Geoffrey Bowker, "Information Mythology: The world of/as information," in Lisa Bud-Frierman, ed, Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, [231-247]
Steve Woolgar, "Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials" in John Law, ed., A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, [58-91]
Rosalind Williams, "'All That Is Solid Melts into Air': Historians of Technology in the Information Revolution" v41 n4 Technology and Culture [641-668]
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/technology_and_culture/toc/tech41.4.html
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology" in Weibe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems [261-280]
Feb 12: critical communication theory -- overcoming Lazarsfeld
Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, "Betwen Media and Mass" and "The Part Played by People," Personal Influence [15-30, 31-42]
Todd Gitlin, "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm" Theory and Society v6 [205-253]
Raymond Williams, "The Technology and the Society" and "Effects of the Technology and its Uses," Television: Technology and Cultural Form [9-31, 119-134]
Erving Goffman, "The Theatrical Frame" and "Breaking Frame," Frame Analysis, [123-155, 345-377]
Michael Schudson, "The Politics of Narrative Form," The Power of News [53-71]
Feb 19: critical communication theory -- overcoming Shannon
Warren Weaver, "Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication" in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication [94-117]
Daniel Chandler, "The Transmission Model of Communication"
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/trans.html
James Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication," and "The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution" (with John J. Quirk), Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society [13-36, 113-141]
Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture" and "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays [3-32, 412-454]
Feb 26: social and cultural history
David Nye, "The Electrical Sublime: The Double of Technology," American Technological Sublime, [143-172]
Lary May, "Through a Lens Darkly: The Decline of Progress," Screening Out the Past: The Birth Of Mass Culture And The Motion Picture Industry [22-42]
Susan Douglas, "Popular Culture and Populist Technology: The Amateur Operators, 1906-1912," Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922, [187-215]
David Morton, "High Culture, High Fidelty, and the Making of Recordings in the American Recording Industry," Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America, [13-47]
[[library online resource ]]
Paul Edwards, "Constructing Artificial Intelligence," The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, [239-274]
[[library online resource ]]
Hillel Schwartz, "Self-Portraits," Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, [89-142]
Mar 5: McLuhan and media ecology
Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message," "Media Hot and Cold," "Reversal of the Overheated Medium," "The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis," "Hybrid Energy: Les Liasions Dangereuses," "Media as Translators," and "Challenge and Collapse: The Nemisis of Creativity," Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, [3-73]
Paul Levinson, "Twentieth-Century Screens" and "Paper Futures," Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution [162-173, 174-186]
Neil Postman, "From Technocracy to Technopoly" and "The Ideology of Machines: Computer Technology" Technopoly, [40-55, 107-122]
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, "Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation" and "Mediation and Remediation," Remediation: Understanding New Media [20-51, 52-62]
[[library online resource ]]
Mar 12: sociology of media production
Howard Becker, "Art Worlds and Collective Activity," "Mobilizing Resources," and "Distributing Art Works," Art Worlds [1-39, 68-92, 93-130]
Adrian Johns, "'The Advancement of Wholesome Knowledge': The Politics of Print and the Practices of Propriety," The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making [187-265]
John Caldwell, "Modes of Production: The Televisual Apparatus," Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, [73-102]
[[library online resource ]]
Gregory Downey, "Virtual Webs, Physical Technologies, and Hidden Workers" Technology and Culture v42 n2 [209-235]
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/technology_and_culture/toc/tech42.2.html
Mar 19: SPRING BREAK
Mar 26: Marxist criticism and the Frankfurt school
Karl Marx, "The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-Value and Value," "The Dual Character of Labor Embodied in Technologies," and "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret," Capital: a Critique of Political Economy [125-130, 131-137, 163-177]
Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" New Left Review v82 [3-16]
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, [217-251]
http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/rcrooks/toolbox/common_knowledge/general_communication/benjamin.html
Adorno, T.W. "Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture" in Horace Newcomb, ed. Television: The Critical View, [239-259]
Jean Baudrillard, "The System of Objects," "Consumer Society," and "Simulacra and Simulation" in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Slected Writings [10-56, 166-184]
Oscar Gandy, "The Surveillance Society: Information Technology and Bureaucratic Social Control" Journal of Communication v39 n3 [61-76]
Apr 2: political economy of technology
Daniel Bell, "The Social Framework of the Information Society," in Michael L. Dertouzous and Joel Moses, eds., The Computer Age: A Twenty Year View [163-211]
James Beniger, "Introduction," Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1986) [1-27]
Herbert Schiller, "Electronics and Economics Serving an American Century," "The Domestic Communications Complex, Part Two: The Military-Industrial Team," and "Towards a Democratic Reconstruction of Mass Communications: The Social Use of Technology," Mass Communications and American Empire, [45-62, 95-106, 191-208]
Dan Schiller, "How to Think About Information" in Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, eds., The Political Economy of Information [27-43]
Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, "Cybernetic Capitalism: Information, Technology, Everyday Life" in Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, eds., The Political Economy of Information [44-75]
Apr 9: cultural studies and audience ethnography
Hall, Stuart "Encoding/Decoding," in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, ed. Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 [128-38]
http://www.merz-akademie.de/~stephan.gregory/texte/hall--encoding-decoding.htm
Ien Ang, "The Battle between Television and its Audiences," "On the Politics of Empirical Audience Research," "New Technologies, Audience Measurement, and the Tactics of Television Consumption," and "Ethnography and Radical Contextualism in Audience Studies," Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, [19-34, 35-52, 53-65, 66-81]
Jeffrey Sconce, "Static and Stasis," Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, [124-166]
Eric Hirsch, "New Technologies and Domestic Consumption" in Christine Geraghty and David Lusted, eds. The Television Studies Book. [158-174]
Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," New Formations v4 [73-102]
Apr 16: feminist criticism
Carol Stabile, "Feminism and the Technological Fix" in Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, eds., Feminisms [508-513]
Michele Martin, "The Making of the Perfect Operator," Hello, Central? Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems [50-90]
Ann Gray, "Behind Closed Doors: Video Recorders in the Home" in Helen Baehr and Gillian Dyer, eds., Boxed-In: Women and Television [38-54]
Lynn Spigel, "Installing the Television Set: Popular Discourses on Television and Domestic Space,1948-1955," Camera Obscura. n16 [11-47]
Jeanette Hoffman, "Writers, Texts, and Writing Acts: Gendered user images in word processing software" in Dougles MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology [222-243]
Lucy Suchman, "Located Accountabilities in Technology Production"
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc039ls.html
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature [149-181]
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
paper proposal due
Apr 23: cultural psychology / activity theory / distributed cognition
Edwin Hutchins, "Distributed Cognition in an Airline Cockpit," in Yrj Engestrm and David Middleton, eds., Cognition and Communication at Work [15-34]
http://hci.ucsd.edu/10/cockpit-cog.pdf
Donald Norman, "Knowing What to Do," Psychology of Everyday Things, [81-104]
Lucy Suchman, "Preface," "Interactive Artifacts, "Sitauted Actions," and "Human-machine Communication," Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-machine Communication [vii-x, 5-26, 49-67, 118-177]
Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day, "A Matter of Metaphor: Technology as Tool, Text, System, Ecology," "Information Ecologies," and "Values and Technology," Information Ecologies: Using Technologies with Heart, [25-47, 49-58, 59-64]
[[library online resource ]]
Apr 30: information and cyberculture
Mark Poster, "The Culture of Underdetermination," What's The Matter with the Internet? [1-20]
N. Katherine Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" [20pp]
http://englishwww.humnet.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/Flick.html
Manuel Castells, "The Space of Flows," Rise of the Network Society [407-459]
Phil Agre, "Conceptions of the User in Computer Systems Design," in Peter J. Thomas, ed., Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces, [67-106]
Nancy Baym, "The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication." in Steven Jones, ed., CyberSociety 2.0: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, [138-163]
Paul Edwards, "Hyper Text and Hypertension: Post-Structuralist Critical Theory, Social Studies of Science, and Software" Social Studies of Science, v24, n2 [229-278]
http://www.jstor.org/journals/03063127.html