Lecture slides:
Video podcasts:
Audio-only podcast (mp3—sorry, no video track):
Week VI: In, Out, and Beyond—



Major Topics:
  • The promise of high-abstraction Net activities
  • Peer-to-peer [p2p] systems as modes of disintermediation
  • Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?—don't ask AOL)
  • Reputation systems and the emergence of collective judgments
  • The Internet as (perhaps) an emergent "life form"
  • Censorship of the Net: Reaction of the powerful reactionaries
  • Government censorship (guns good, sex bad)
Assigned Readings:
  • This video, "The Web is US_ing Us," is embeded in this week's lecture, but you should take some time viewing it, as it offers a lot of info on what we're addressing this week.
  • Paul Resnick, Richard Zeckhauser, Eric Friedman, and Ko Kuwabara, "Reputation Systems." Communications of the ACM XLIII:12 (December, 2000), 45-48.
  • Peter Morville, a close ally of the School of Information, suggests that with ubiquitous connectivity, we can look for objects, informational and physical, in something he calls "Ubiquitous Findability."
  • Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, "The Semantic Web," Scientific American (Web version: May 17, 2001).
  • The poswer of grid computing, combined with networks of information sharing, has made possible a new "Bioinformatics Grid." There's a similar grid for climatologists, giving us all a better measure of global warming.
  • The Pew Trust has sponsored a body of quality research on the impact of the internet on American life; here's a recent Pew report on Internet Social Networks. It's long, so feel free just to read the summary of findings if you lack sufficient time.
  • For a sense of the fear and paranoia about the "dangerous" Web, try the eerily titled, "The Underground Web," from Business Week.
  • Lest you believe that US businesses are fighting the good fight for free speech in China, see this piece, "The Net Effect," by Steven Cherry in IEEE Spectrum. Here's a not-too-subtle cartoon on the subject.
  • Laura Blumenfeld, "Dissertation Could Be Security Threat," Washington Post (July 8, 2003), p. A01
Recommended Readings:
  • Lest you believe that social-networking sites are easy business successes, here's the story of why Friendster failed, despite being the first major site to figure out social networking.
  • Congress' attempts to force libraries to censor porn are again being challenged, this time by the ACLU.
  • For those of you who might like to become involved in fighting net censorship and building free speech and democracy on the Web, from Reporters without Borders, here's their Cyberdissident Handbook.
  • A relatively up-to-date piece on practical Web-Service implementations.
  • A brief filed on behalf of librarians in Minneapolis; they felt pr0n on the screen was a form of sexual harrassment.
  • As you might well imagine, with the cooperation of US firms with the Chinese government's censorship activities, it's a natural for The Daily Show to address the question.
  • Some people believe that reputation systems and the like tend to over-focus attention on the Web; "Telling you What You Like," by Alex Pham and Jon Healey of the LA Times addresses that.
  • Steve Lohr, "Teaching Computers to Work in Unison," The New York Times (July 15, 2003).
  • MSpace, an application of semantic Web concepts for music, provides a good example of that technology.
  • Here's an amazing piece by Joichi Ito, a leader in Web visioning, on how the Web encourages "Emergent Democracy" by building virtual communities.
  • A pair of lists of Web sites blocked by filtering software, from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Peacefire
  • A key article that sparked new thinking about networks of knowledge:Mark Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties…." Sociological Theory I (1983), 201-233.
  • To temper the optimism we often have in terms of the promise of high-abstraction Net computing, we need to consider the consequences of system failures (remember the Blackout of 2003?)
  • Finally, the text of the Supreme Court decision in US v. ALA (2003), where the Supremes upheld CIPA.
  • Some CS experts at UC-Davis have been researching how the Chinese censorship government firewall works, and discovered that though it works by blocking keywords rather than IP addresses, its greatest impact is that it induces self-censorship.
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