Syllabus: The Computerized Society—US Digital Culture Since WWII, Fall 2015

Required Material:

• Nathan Ensmenger, “Introduction: Computer Revolutionaries,” in The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 1-26
• Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, and Jeffrey R. Yost, “Part I: Before the Computer,” Computer: A History of the Information Machine, Third Edition (New York: Westview Press, 2014), 3-61

Optional:

• Evgeny Morozov, “Making It,” New Yorker, 13 January 2014
• Anthony Grafton, “Jumping Through the Computer Screen,” New York 
Review of Books, 23 December 2010

Required Material:

• “Part II: Creating the Computer,” in Computer, 65-139
• The Machine That Changed the World documentary film (1992), Parts 1 and 2

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

Optional:

• Marie Hicks, “Only the Clothes Changed: Women Operators in British Computing and Advertising, 1950-1970,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32, 2 (October-December 2010), 2-14

You have been asked by Wired magazine to develop an *analytic* essay about the most significant aspect of the early history of the computer and the “digital.” Using specific evidence, precisely referenced and described, develop a 750-1000 word article that explains how and why this significant aspect matters to our understanding of the early history of computation and the computerized society. What aspect of this history should we most care about and why? Be sure to refer to the guidelines for assignments in the “Expectations” section of the syllabus.

Required Material:

• Paul N. Edwards, “‘We Defend Every Place’: Building the Cold War World,” in The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 1-41
• “Part 3: Innovation and Expansion,” in Computer, 143-225
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, dir. Stanley Kubrick (1964)

Optional:

• Fred Turner, “The Cold 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

Required Material:

• Daniel Bell, Ch. 2, “From Goods to Services: The Changing Shape of the Economy,” Ch. 3, “The Dimensions of Knowledge and Technology: The New Class Structure of Post-Industrial Society,” and Ch. 6, “Who Will Rule? Politicians and Technocrats in the Post-Industrial Society,” in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 121-165, 339-367

Optional:

• Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 3-67
• David Harvey, “Part II: The political-economic transformation of late twentieth-century capitalism,” in The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 121-197

*Note: Don’t worry if you don’t understand the readings for today. They are difficult. Try your best to make sense of them, particularly when the subject turns toward the larger stakes and implications of computers and digital technology.*

Required Material:

• 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
• 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
• Desk Set, film (1957)

Optional:

• Nathan Ensmenger, “The Black Art of Programming,” and “The Cosa Nostra of the Data Processing Industry,” in The Computer Boys Take Over, 27-49, 137-161

Required Material:

• Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), xix-241 (don’t worry, this is a quick-moving journalistic account and is not as much reading as first appears by the page count)
• Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic (July 1945)
• The Machine That Changed the World documentary film (1992), Part 3

Required Material:

• Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1-102
• 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
• Campell, et. al., Ch. 10, “The Shaping of the Personal Computer,” Computer, 229-251

Optional:

• Triumph of the Nerds, documentary film (1996)

Required Material:

• “Part 4: Broadening the Appeal” in Computer, 253-305
• Turner, From Cyberculture to Counterculture, 103-174
• WarGames, film (1983)

Optional:

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

Required Material:

• William Gibson, “Burning Chrome,” the Omni (1982), reprinted in Burning Chrome (New York: Harper Voyager, 2003)
• Dani Cavallaro, “Introduction: Science Fiction and Cyberpunk,” in 
Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction in the Work of William Gibson 
(Continuum, 2001), 1-25

Optional:

• Tron, film (1982)
• Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), 149-181
• Bruce Sterling, “Preface,” Mirrorshades (1986), http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/mirrorshades_preface.html
• Browse The CyberPunk Project, http://project.cyberpunk.ru

You have been asked by Apple Computer to design a new personal computer. Your job is to draw a sketch or diagram of this machine (either by hand and then photographed or scanned into your computer, equipment available at NU Library for this if you do not possess it yourself, or by machine). 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 computer design and how and why they 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:

• Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 1-103
• 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
• John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996), https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

Optional:

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

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

Optional:

• Jean-François Blanchette, “A Material History of Bits,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62, 6 (April 2011): 1042-1057
• Eugene Thacker, “Foreword: Protocol Is as Protocol Does,” in Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), xi-xxii

Required Material:

• Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And 
Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), xi-148
• The Matrix Trilogy, films 1 and 2: The Matrix (1999), Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Optional:

• 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/

Required Material:

• Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything, 149-217
• The Matrix Trilogy, film 3: Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Optional:

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

Tu 11/17

Required Material:

• Jaron Lanier, “Digital Passivity,” New York Times, 27 November 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/opinion/digital-passivity.html
• Jaron Lanier, “Fixing the Digital Economy,” New York Times, 8 June 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/fixing-the-digital-economy.html
• Danah Boyd, “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook,” in Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White , eds., Race After the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2012), 203-222
• Evgeny Morozov, “Solutionism and Its Discontents,” in To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 1-16
• Rebecca Solnit, “Dairy,” London Review of Books 36, 4 (20 February 2014), 34-35, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n04/rebecca-solnit/diary
• Colin Kinninberg, “Beyond ‘Conflict Minerals’: The Congo’s Resource Curse Lives On,” Dissent, Spring 2014, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/beyond-conflict-minerals-the-congos-resource-curse-lives-on
• All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, documentary film by Adam Curtis (2011)

Optional:

• Anna Everett, “Have We Become Postracial Yet?: Race and Media Technologies in the Age of President Obama,” in Race After the Internet, 146-167
• Carmen Hermosillo aka humdog,”Introducing Humdog: Pandora’s Vox Redux ” (1994),” http://folksonomy.co/?permalink=2299
• Ensmenger, “Conclusions: Visible Technicians,” in Computer Boys, 223-243

You have been asked 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 and symbolic nature of the Internet and/or Google.

Then, in 1000 words, develop an analytic essay in which you contextualize *what is significant* about your Matrix 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 and/or Google. The goal of the assignment is not breadth and coverage so much as a display of your capacities for precision and depth of analysis. This, as you may quickly realize, of course requires that you develop an overarching sense of our studies, then go deep in explaining what you take to be the key parts of one to four specific examples from our materials.

Also note: your thesis can pivot from your Matrix pitch to your analysis of materials we studied in class, but you need not knit your pitch into every aspect of your essay. In other words, use your pitch as a way to spark effective historical analysis, but do not be beholden to your pitch in structuring your essay.

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” or a “Googlized” society. Be sure to refer to the guidelines for assignments in the “Expectations” section of the syllabus.

Thu 12/10

In 1500-2000 words, develop an analytic essay about three related readings or viewings from the course. Your essay must articulate a compelling argument that addresses what we learn about “the computerized society” by bringing together these particular materials and the details within them. You may embed multimedia and digital design elements into your essay to enhance your argument and narrative (try to integrate them into the essay to push its argument forward effectively). You will be evaluated for depth and precision of analysis rather than breadth of coverage; which is to say, your task is to develop, sharpen, and crystallize a sub-theme from the course that your three items most vividly illuminate rather than convey your knowledge of everything in the class. Zoom in on and take us down one compelling stream of history that we have studied and that you have been most interested in from the course. Be sure to refer to the guidelines for assignments in the “Expectations” section of the syllabus.