Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

I'm currently putting together the syllabus for my NYU Masters course this Fall, entitled "Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace." Usually when I teach a class like this, I tell a story on a timeline, painting cyberculture as an evolving entity. This time, however, I'm thinking about it in terms of subject areas, in which each week traces the past, present and future of a given meme or concept. My tentative list of 10 concepts/subject areas is as follows:

1: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud
2: The Metaverse
3: Hackers and Gamers
4: OSS/FS/CC
5: dot-com Fantasies
6: Web 2.0
7: Remix/Configurable Culture
8: The Cloud
9: Surveillance, Sensors and Robots
10: Adventures in MeatSpace

I'd love any and all informed feedback on either (a) subjects I need to add, delete or merge, and (b) vital readings/viewings/playings for a given subject. Email or blog comments will do. Thanks!

Comments

[Jenny Cool]

This looks like a great course! I’d love to know more about your thinking behind the categories (like 10.) and how you’ve ordered them before I chime in with suggestions, but fwiw here are some thoughts, roughly in the order I had/am having them.

Guy’s comments are great for showing the density of symbolic meaning of designations such as “hacker” and “The Cloud.” The overlap, ambiguities, and positional definitions he describes are, to me, exactly what make them useful topos of scholarly consideration.

Recommended Readings

4: OSS/FS/CC
Christopher Kelty
Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics
Cultural Anthropology
Volume 20. Issue 2. May 2005 (Pages 185 - 214)
http://www.anthrosource.net/Abstract.aspx?issn=0886-7356&volume=20&issue=2&doubleissueno=0&article=238282&suppno=0&jstor=False

Two Bits: The cultural significance of Free Software
http://twobits.net/
Kelty’s new book that he got Duke to publish online at same time as print.

The recursive publics article is probably a better course reading, especially because it's shorter and much easier read.

Because I’m an anthropologist, I noticed the 10 concepts here are mostly “insider” (emic) terms, rather than outsider/analytic ones, such as “public sphere,” etc. That makes perfect sense given you mention memes and I assume you’ll be looking at ‘em all analytically and critically. But, it leads me to wonder if/where/how you will be looking at, for example, governmental or institutional visions of cyberspace (other than in 1 or 9, perhaps)? Or aspects of spatiality itself. But I don’t think those are vital to the outline you’ve got here, even if they might be to someone else’s exploration/exposition of this territory.

For 6: Web 2.0
You might find some useful readings and media links at this site for my pal Liz Losh’s course.
http://digitalrhetoric.org/2008/reading.html

Her new book, also has a lot of great examples for teaching on digital media.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11697

Would love to see the final syllabus when it’s done.

Cheers, Jenny//

[gdickinson]

I'm sure there are many more who are better qualified to give an opinion here, particularly in an academic context, but I see a great deal of overlap between sections 3 and 4, and sections 6 and 8:

* Depending, of course, on who is bearing the label 'hacker', you will find many hackers who are frequent users of and contributors to OSS, and vice versa. It's rare to find a *NIX tool these days which isn't GPL'd or BSD'd, especially in the security community. Some easy examples which come to mind are nmap (http://insecure.org), and metasploit (http://metasploit.org)

* "The Cloud" is the term du jour for all manner of things, and it's up for debate what those things actually are. Most users of the modern Internet will be familiar with 'the cloud' as a catch-all term for Software-as-a-Service products like Gmail and twitter. Developers may be more familiar The Cloud as platform-as-a-service, with apps like Facebook's Application API, SalesForce's App API, and so on. And infrastructure nerds are likely to think that The Cloud has more to do with outsourced computing primitives (store, compute, etc), that one can buy from Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine among many others.

I could ramble indefinitely on any one of the above but that's what came to mind immediately.

Hope all's well,
Guy