Guest Lecturer's slides:
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Week XIV: Cyberculture[?]

Guest Lecturer: Jude Yew

Major Topics:
  • Is "cyberculture" different any more from "the real world"?
  • The interpenetration of the virtual and the real in the third phase of the Web : proximate sociability
  • Individualism and sociability in the cyber world
  • The eclipse of the "good hacker"
  • The imaged and imagined body: intimacy in the virtual world(?)
  • Social networks as infrastructures for viral marketing; is it all about business?
  • A new world of user-generated content; p2p democracy/socialism?
Assigned Readings:
  • Mizuko ("Mimi") Ito is an emerging star in the world of networked sociability; here is the Introduction to a volume she edited with Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda, Personal, Portable, and Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (MIT Press, 2005), 1-15.
  • An interesting piece by legal scholar Cass Sunstein on how the personalization of commerce in the electronic environment threatens to reinforce centrifugal tendencies in our civic culture, turning citizens into [narcissistic] consumers.
  • In this week's swamp of cyber-skepticist material, here's a somewhat-dated piece by Joyce Cohen that I find fascinating: we think of computing as an activity that raises the bar for precision, but as I've argued in my own work, humans seem to love ambiguity--it's the dynamic of the unsaid and suggestive--and email systems seem to serve our goals of "ambiguation" quite nicely, thank you.
  • You are probably more familiar with the myriad different "social networking" sites, but we invite you to visit and think about Friendster, facebook, and MySpace. Here's a piece by Teresa Riordan on how social networks can be leveraged (insidiously, I believe) to pursue viral marketing. If you're feeling bold, you might want to google for sites that offer sexual intimacy without guilt.
  • In a very important debate opened up 15 or more years ago by Donna Haraway, many of us debated whether the emergence of cyborgs--post-human syntheses of our own wetware and IT--signalled a profound redefinition of gender. Deborah Tannen was never convinced, and this article by Anne Eisenberg shows how humans cannot shake gendered ways of communication. You'll probably conclude the same after surfing the sites noted above.
Recommended Readings:
  • The Web obviously offers many opportunities for bottom-up, alternative-culture creativity; one of my favorite examples is the Wooster Collective; another is YellowArrow (linking place to cyberspace in a massive tagging scavenger-hunt), and of course, YouTube.
  • This is a long, but fascinating piece on the ways that identities and sources of knowledge can be profoundly redefined in cyberspace; specifically, this piece addresses the exploits of a 15-year-old "lawyer" on the Net, and how rating/reputation systems helped to invent him.
  • Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, and now a genuine IT futurist and guru, wrote a seminal, yet disturbing piece on the dystopian implications of emerging knowledge-generating systems, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." Ted Kaczynski meets Ray Kurzweil in this pre-911 piece; Al Qaeda's invisible presence is almost palpable here.
  • Just what America needs in its quest for romanticizing the hacker, a biography of Captain Crunch, the famed creator of the black box; written by the Times' John Markoff, who seems to be trying to heal wounds he opened by attacking Kevin Mitnik in print.
  • If I may beg your patience here for another nifty piece, a wonderful commentary about the twilight of the geek facing the onrush of libertarianism; I guess the hippies have now been replaced by the MBAs… Not a surprise, given that "do your own thing" got replaced by "I got mine" in the 1980s.
  • Though perhaps a bit dated, this piece, "Cyberselfish," by Paula Barsook, bemoans the hyper-individualistic character of cyberculture, a world where narcissistic self-fulfillment and dog-eat-dog pursuit of personal goals, helps to annihilate any remaininng shread of community spirit. It's a pretty arch piece, and good fodder for thought, even moreso if you disagree with it.
  • Just perfect for increasing our paranoia about terrorists, here's an important piece on information warfare. It's cruder than, say, viral marketing (a strategy used by marketers to conquer consumers), but far more insidious and dangerous.
  • One of the great pundits of the late 20th century Amatai Etizioni, lays out the positive prospects for building a satisfying global cyberculture.