Course Title: Cultures of Cyberspace and the Web
by David Silver
Course Description:
The last ten years have been marked, in part, by the exponential growth of the Internet and, specifically, the Web. Once the domain of scientists and engineers, the Web now intersects with the everyday lives of millions, producing social, ethical, and cultural consequences and fostering economic and political applications. In an attempt both to
understand and be a part of this development, this course considers
cyberculture and introduces a number of ways of thinking about it.
Among the topics addressed are hypertext, multimedia, authorship, community, governance, identity, gender, race, cyberspace, political economy, and ideology.
David Silver is the Director of the Center for Cyberculture Studies (http://otal.umd.edu/~rccs/).
All rights for this course syllabus reside with David Silver.
Syllabus
CONTEXTS & CONSTRUCTIONS
Required Readings:
* Thomas Swiss, "Introduction: The Web, Language, and Society"
* Steve Jones, "The Internet and its Social Landscape" (VC)
* Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, & Gilbert B. Rodman, "Race in Cyberspace: An Introduction" (RC)
* David Silver, "Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000" (handout)
* Jonathan Sterne, "Thinking the Internet: Cultural Studies vs. The Millennium" (handout)
* Thomas Swiss & Andrew Herman, "Introduction: The World Wide Web as Magic, Metaphor, and Power" (WWW)
* Ellen Ullman, "Come in, CQ: The Body on the Wire" (WW)
VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES: PUBLICS & POSSIBILITIES
Required Readings:
* Jodi Dean, "Community"
* Peter Kollock & Marc A. Smith, "Communities in Cyberspace" (CC)
* Margaret McLaughlin, Kerry Osborne & Nicole Ellison, "Virtual Community in a Telepresence Environment" (VC)
* Elizabeth Reid, "Hierarchy and Power: Social Control in Cyberspace" (CC)
* Howard Rheingold, "The Heart of the WELL" (online)
* Nessim Watson, "Why We Argue About Virtual Community: A Case Study of Phish.Net Fan Community" (VC)
* Barry Wellman & Milena Gulia, "Virtual Communities as Communities: Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone" (CC)
VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES: COMPLICATING MATTERS
Required Readings:
* Stephanie Brail, "The Price of Admission: Harassment and Free Speech in the Wild, Wild West" (WW)
* Janelle Brown, "There Goes the Neighborhood" (online)
* L. Jean Camp, "We Are Geeks, and We Are Not Guys: The Systers Mailing List" (WW)
* Jan Fernback & Brad Thompson, "Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?" (online)
* Guillermo Gómez-Peña, "The Virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier (or the Chicano interneta)" (online)
* Susan Zickmund, "Approaching the Radical Others: The Discursive Culture of Cyberhate" (VC)
Further Readings:
* Brook, James and Iain A. Boal, editors. Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. San Francisco: City Lights, 1995.
* Sardar, Ziauddin. "alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West." In Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, edited by Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome R. Ravetz, 14-41. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
* Shapiro, Andrew L. "Street Corners in Cyberspace." The Nation (July 3, 1995): 10-14.
IDENTITIES, LIQUID SELVES
Required Readings:
* Jay Bolter, "Identity"
* Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace" (online)
* Judith S. Donath, "Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community" (CC)
* Lori Kendall, "MUDder? I Hardly Know 'Er! Adventures of a Feminist MUDder"
* Richard MacKinnon, "Punishing the Persona: Correctional Strategies for the Virtual Offender" (VC)
* "Sex and Death among the Cyborgs" — Interview with Sandy Stone (online)
* "Who Am We?" — Interview with Sherry Turkle (online)
PLACE AND POLITICS IN CYBERSPACE
Required Readings:
* Rob Shields, "Cyberspace"
* Timothy Luke, "Governance"
* Steve Cisler, "Community Computer Networks: Building Electronic Greenbelts" (online)
* Vincent Mosco, "Webs of Myth and Power: Connectivity and the New Computer Technopolis" (WWW)
* Joseph Schmitz, "Structural Relations, Electronic Media, and Social Change: The Public Electronic Network and the Homeless" (VC)
* David Silver, "Margins in the Wires: Looking for Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Blacksburg Electronic Village" (RC)
* Willard Uncapher, "Electronic Homesteading on the Rural Frontier: Big Sky Telegraph and its Community" (CC)
RACE & CYBERSPACE
Required Readings:
* Lisa Nakamura, "Race"
* Byron Burkhalter, "Reading Race Online: Discovering Racial Identity in Usenet Discussions" (CC)
* Beth Kolko, "Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)Face" (RC)
* Ananda Mitra, "Virtual Commonality: Looking for India on the Internet" (VC)
* Lisa Nakamura, "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet" (online)
GENDER, FEMINISM, & NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Required Readings:
* Cynthia Fuchs, "Gender"
* Susan Clerc, "Estrogen Brigades and 'Big Tits' Threads: Media Fandom Online and Off" (WW)
* Dawn Dietrich, "Re-fashioning the Techno-Erotic Woman: Gender and Textuality in the Cybercultural Matrix" (VC)
* Michele Evard, "'So Please Stop, Thank You': Girls Online" (WW)
* Jodi O'Brien, "Writing in the Body: Gender (Re)production in Online Interaction" (CC)
* Laurel A. Sutton, "Cocktails and Thumbtacks in the Old West: What Would Emily Post Say?" (WW)
THE LITERARY WEB
Required Readings:
*Matthew Kirschenbaum, "Hypertext"
*Joseph Tabbi, "Narrative"
*Russell Potterm "Authorship"
DISCOURSES OF CYBERSPACE
Required Readings:
* John Sloop, "Ideology"
* Sean Cubitt, "Multimedia"
* Dawn Dietrich," "Performance"
* Richard Barbrook, "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy" (online)
* Paulina Borsook, "The Memoirs of a Token: An Aging Berkeley Feminist Examines Wired" (WW)
* Borsook, Paulina. "Cyberselfish." Mother Jones, July/August 1996. (online).
* Karen Coyle, "How Hard Can It Be?" (WW)
* David Crane, "In Medias Race: Filmic Representations, Networked Communication, and Racial Intermediation" (RC)
* Andrew Herman & John H. Sloop, "'Red Alert!': Rhetorics of the World Wide Web and 'Friction Free' Capitalism" (WWW)
* Joe Lockard, "Babel Machines and Electronic Universalism" (RC)
* Lisa Nakamura, "'Where Do You Want to Go Today?': Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality" (RC)
* Hayles, N. Katherine. "The Seductions of Cyberspace." In Rethinking Technologies, edited by Verena Andermatt Conley on behalf of the Miami Theory Collective, 173-190. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
CYBERSPACE.COM: COMMERCE & COMMERCIALIZATION
Required Readings:
* Vincent Mosco, " Political Economy"
* Paulina Borsook, "How the Internet Ruined San Francisco" (online)
* Greg Elmer, "The Economy of Cyberpromotion: Awards on the World Wide Web" (WWW)
* Peter Kollock, "The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace" (CC)
* Daniel Marschall, "'Nurture the Hurt, Dude!': An Ethnographic Portrait of an Internet Software Development Firm" (handout)
* Robert McChesney, "So Much for the Magic of Technology and the Free Market: The World Wide Web and the Corporate Media System" (WWW)
* Tiziana Terranova, "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy" (Social Text 18:2 — handout)
* David Tetzlaff, "Yo-Ho-Ho and a Server of Warez: Internet Software Piracy and the New Global Information Economy" (WWW)
