Syllabus—The Computerized Society

Required Material:

·      Roy Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet,” American Historical Review 103, 5 (December 1998), 1530-1552

·      Raymond Williams, “The Technology and the Society” (1974), in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds., The New Media Reader (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003), 289-300

·      James W. Cortada, “Studying History As It Unfolds, Part 1: Creating the History of Information Technologies,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 37, 3 (July-September 2015), 20-31

·      James W. Cortada, “Studying History As It Unfolds, Part 2: Tooling Up the Historians,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38, 1 (January-March 2016), 48-59

Required Material:

·      Ceruzzi, 1-21

·      Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), in The New Media Reader, 49-64

·      The Machine That Changed the World documentary film, dir. Nancy Linde (1992), Part 1, “Giant Brains”

Required Material:

·      Ceruzzi, 23-53

·      Paul N. Edwards, “Why Build Computers? The Military Role in Computer Research,” in The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 42-73

·      Norbert Wiener, “Men, Machines, and the World About” (1954), in The New Media Reader, 65-72

Required Material:

·      Jennifer Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, 3 (1999): 455-483

·      W. Barkley Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, 3 (1996), 13-28

·      Nathan Ensmenger, “The Black Art of Programming,” in The Computer Boys Take Over, 27-49

·      William F. Vogel, “‘The Spitting Image of a Woman Programmer’: Changing Portrayals of Women in the American Computing Industry, 1958-1985,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39, 1 (July 2017), 49-64

·      Rhaina Cohen, “What Programming’s Past Reveals About Today’s Gender-Pay Gap,” The Atlantic, 7 September 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/what-programmings-past-reveals-about-todays-gender-pay-gap/498797/

·      Hidden Figures, dir. Theodore Melfi (2016)

Required Material:

·      Ceruzzi, 54-80

·      Edwards, “‘We Defend Every Place’: Building the Cold War World,” and “Sage” in The Closed World, 1-41, 74-111

·      Andrew Meade McGee, “Computerizing America: Presidents, Business, and Politics in a Digital Age,” in The American President and Capitalism Since 1945, eds. Roger Biles and Mark Rose (University of Florida Press, 2017), 207-228

·      JCR Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” The Transaction of Human Factors in Electronics (March, 1960), 4-11, in The New Media Reader, 73-82

·      Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned to Love the Bomb, dir. Stanley Kubrick (1964)

Required Material:

·      Fred Turner, “The Cold War and the Democratic Personality,” in The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 151-180

·      Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message” (1964, from Understanding Media) and “The Galaxy Reconfigured or the Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society (1969, from The Gutenberg Galaxy), 193-210

·      The Machine That Changed the World documentary film, dir. Nancy Linde (1992), Part 2, “Inventing the Future”

·      You have been asked by Wired magazine to develop an analytic essay about the history of gender and the early development of the computer. Select 1-3 items from our required materials thus far in the course to use as your source material. Using specific evidence, precisely referenced and described from those items, develop an article of approximately 1000 words that explains a particular dimension of how gender shapes our understanding of the early history of computation and the computerized society. Rather than creating a static definition of what gender means, consider how our materials suggest the historical ways in which gender played out in and through the development of the modern computer and digital culture. How does the full story of the computer’s development reveal historical assumptions about the role of men and women? Did it alter these assumptions in some way? How did the ongoing state of war that the United States was in from World War II into the Cold War shape understandings and practices of gender? Did gender shape the nature of these wars as well in some way? You might even probe a seemingly strange questions such as: do computers themselves possess a gender? Why or why not? How or how not? You need not address all these questions; they are merely prompts. Pick a particular question that has arisen from your reading and viewing and use it to frame a specific aspect of gender and the history of the early computer. Be sure to refer to the guidelines for assignments in the “Expectations” section of the syllabus.

Required Material:

·      Ceruzzi, 81-103

·      Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic (July 1945), in The New Media Reader, 35-48

·      Andrew Utterson, “Computers in the Workplace: IBM and the ‘Electronic Brain’ of Desk Set,” in From IBM to MGM: Cinema At the Dawn of the Digital Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 16-32

·      Desk Set, dir. Walter Lang (1957)

Required Material:

·      Steven Lubar, “Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate: A Cultural History of the Punch Card,” Journal of American Culture 15, 4 (Winter 1992), 43-55

·      Alex Sayf Cummings, “Of Sorcerers and Thought Leaders: Marketing the Information Revolution in the 1960s,” The Sixties 9, 1 (Spring 2016), 1-25

·      Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture,” American Quarterly 66, 4 (December 2014): 919-941

·      Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits,” Computer History Museum Website, 2 January 2014, http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/indigenous-circuits/

·      Tara McPherson, “U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX,” in Race After the Internet, eds. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White (New York: Routledge, 2012), 21-37

·      Silicon Valley, dir. Randall MacLowry and Tracy Heather Strain (2013)

Required Material:

·      Ceruzzi, 103-119

·      Michael A. Hiltzik, “Utopia,” in Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 52-67

·      Douglas Engelbart, From Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962), in The New Media Reader, 93-108

·      Ivan Sutherland, “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System” (1963), in The New Media Reader, 109-126

·      Douglas Engelbart and William English, “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect” (1968), in The New Media Reader, 231-246.

·      Roy Ascott, “The Construction of Change” (1964), in The New Media Reader, 127-132

·      The Machine That Changed the World documentary film, dir. Nancy Linde (1992), Part 3, “The Paperback Computer”

Required Material:

·      Fred Turner, “The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor” and “Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture,” in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 11-39, 41-68

·      Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone 7 December 1972, http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

·      Theodor H. Nelson, “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate” (1965), in The New Media Reader, 133-146

·      Theodor H. Nelson, From Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1970-1974), in The New Media Reader, 301-338

·      Theodor H. Nelson, Nicholas Negroponte and Les Levine, From Software–Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (1970), in The New Media Reader, 247-276

·      Triumph of the Nerds, dir. John Gau (1996)

Required Material:

·      Paul Ceruzzi, “Inventing Personal Computing” in The Social Shaping of Technology, eds. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Philadelphia: 
Open University Press, 1999), 64-86

·      Meryl Alper, “‘Can Our Kids Hack It With Computers?’ Constructing Youth Hackers in Family Computing Magazines (1983–1987),” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014), 673–698

·      Nicholas Negroponte, From Soft Architecture Machines (1975), in The New Media Reader, 353-366

·      Joseph Weizenbaum, From Computer Power and Human Reason (1976), in The New Media Reader, 367-376

·      Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, “Personal Dynamic Media” (1977), in The New Media Reader, 391-404

·      Seymour A. Papert, From Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), in The New Media Reader, 413-432

·      Richard A. Bolt, “‘Put-That-There’: Voice and Gesture at the Graphics Interface” (1980), in The New Media Reader, 433-440

·      WarGames, film (1983)

·      8 Bit Generation: The Commodore Computer Wars, dir. Tomaso Walliser (2016)

Required Material:

·      William Gibson, “Burning Chrome,” the Omni (1982), reprinted in Burning Chrome (New York: Harper Voyager, 2003)

·      Sherry Turkle, “Video Games and Computer Holding Power” (1984, from The Second Self), in The New Media Reader, 499-514

·      Tron, dir. Steven Lisberger (1982)

·      The Machine That Changed the World documentary film, dir. Nancy Linde (1992), Part 4, “The Thinking Machine”

·      You have been asked by Apple Computer to design a new personal computing device. Your job is to draw a sketch or diagram of this machine (either by hand and then scanned or born-digital). Then, in 1000 words, develop an analytic essay in which you contextualize *what is significant* about your design in the context of the history of the personal computer (from its prehistory at places such as Xerox PARC to the emergence of the personal computer in the countercultural context of the 1960s and 1970s. You will not be evaluated for the excellence of your design (or your drawing skills!), but rather by how you are able to develop an evidence-based argument that connects *specific aspects* of the materials from class (lectures, readings, viewings) to an articulated and compelling position about the details of your new personal computing device design. How and why does your device build upon and/or extend the history of the concept of “personal” computing? Be sure to refer to the guidelines for assignments in the “Expectations” section of the syllabus.

Required material:

·      Ceruzzi, 121-154

·      Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 1-103

·      John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996), https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

·      Safiya Umoja Noble, “Challenging Cybertopias,” Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018), 61-63.

·      Bradley Fidler and Morgan Currie, “The Production and Interpretation of ARPANET Maps,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 37, 1 (January-March 2015), 44-55

·      Bradley Fidler and Morgan Currie, “Infrastructure, Representation, and Historiography in BBN’s Arpanet Map,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38, 3 (July-September 2016), 44-57

·      Janet Abbate, “Privatizing the Internet: Competing Visions and Chaotic Events, 1987-1995,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32, 1 (January- March 2010), 10-22

·      “Internet History from ARPANET to Broadband,” 2007 Congressional Digest

·      Jan L. Bordewijk and Ben van Kaam, “Towards a New Classification of the Tele-Information Services” (1986), in The New Media Reader, 575-586

·      The Machine That Changed the World documentary film, dir. Nancy Linde (1992), Part 5, “The World at Your Fingertips”

Required Material:

·      Andrew Blum, Tubes, 105-271

·      Christine Smallwood, “What Does the Internet Look Like,” The Baffler 18 (December 2009), 8-12, republished at http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/4/3/what-does-the-internet-look-like

·      Shannon Mattern, “Scaffolding, Hard And Soft: Infrastructures As Critical And Generative Structures,” Words in Space, 18 September 2014, http://wordsinspace.net/shannon/2014/09/18/scaffolding-hard-and-soft-infrastructures-as-critical-and-generative-structures/

·      The Matrix, dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski (formerly the Wachowski Brothers) (1999)

Required Material:

·      Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), xi-148

·      Bill Nichols, “The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems” (1988), in The New Media Reader, 625-642

·      Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, Ari Loutonen, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Arthur Secret, “The World Wide Web” (1994), in The New Media Reader, 791-798

·      Sue Halpern, “Are We Puppets Yet in a Wired World?,” New York Review of Books, 7 November 2013, 24-28, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/are-we-puppets-wired-world/

·      Joshua Adams, “Thinking About Google Search As A Colonial Tool,” Medium, 17 March 2018, https://medium.com/@journojoshua/thinking-about-google-search-as-a-colonial-tool-a6bfed053810

·      The Matrix Reloaded, dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski (formerly the Wachowski Brothers)  (2003)

Required Material:

·      Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything, 149-217

·      Zeynep Tufekci, “What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson: Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson,” The Message, 14 August 2014, https://medium.com/message/ferguson-is-also-a-net-neutrality-issue-6d2f3db51eb0

·      Rusty Foster, “When Programmers Scrape By,” The New Yorker, 11 February 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/02/when-programmers-scrape-by.html

·      Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “The Great AI Awakening,” New York Times, 14 December 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html

·      Virginia Eubanks, “The Digital Poorhouse,” Harper’s, January 2018, https://harpers.org/archive/2018/01/the-digital-poorhouse/

·      The Matrix Revolutions, dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski (formerly the Wachowski Brothers)  (2003)

Required Material:

·      Ceruzzi, 155-159

·      Electric Frontier Foundation, “NSA Spying On Americans,” https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

·      Philip E. Agre, “Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy” (1994), in The New Media Reader, 737-760

·      Fred Kaplan, “We’re Wandering in Dark Territory,” in Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 265-286

·      Kate Crawford, “Letter to Silicon Valley,” Harper’s Magazine (February 2017), 36-38

·      Zeynep Tufekci, “YouTube, the Great Radicalizer,” New York Times, 10 March 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html

·      Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, http://www.brautigan.net/graphics/machines/machines-loudspeaker.gif ; https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving-Grace

·      All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, dir. Adam Curtis (2011), Parts 1, Love and Power: The Influence of Ayn Rand; Part 2, The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts: Ecology, Technology, and Society

Required Material:

·      Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 1-34, 127-149, 241-306

·      Evgeny Morozov, “Solutionism and Its Discontents,” in To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 1-16

·      All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, dir. Adam Curtis (2011), Part 3, The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey: The Selfish Gene

Tu 03/20

·      You have been asked by a major motion picture company to pitch a sequel to The Matrix Trilogy that specifically addresses the development of the Internet. Your pitch should be no more than 200 words and specifically imagine a film that speaks to the material nature of the Internet as a network and/or its changing nature in the context of the rise of the Internet, Google, and social media platforms. Then, in 1000 words, develop an analytic essay in which you contextualize *what is significant* about your pitch to what you take to be the most relevant details, arguments, and analysis from our readings, viewings, and lectures about the phenomenon of the Internet, Google, and social media. You will not be evaluated for the aesthetic excellence of your cinematic vision (though aesthetic excellence is welcome!) nor for the probability that you have imagined a Hollywood blockbuster (though more power to you if you have!), but rather by how you are able to develop an evidence-based argument that connects *specific aspects* of the materials from class (lectures, readings, viewings) to an articulated and compelling position about the details of your pitch and how and why they speak interpretively to the stakes of social life in an “Internet” and “Googlized” and “Alone Together” society. Be sure to refer to the guidelines for assignments in the “Expectations” section of the syllabus.