NCSU Department of Communication

COM487::Internet & Society
Instructor: Dr. Adriana de Souza e Silva

 

Home

Syllabus

Class schedule

Assignments

Readings

Resources

Weblog

There will be weekly readings. This is a reading-intensive course in which you will be asked to deal with material that is often quite challenging in its language and theoretical positions. You should expect to read about 60 pages a week, and write a brief summary/comment on each text you read. You are excused from writing your comment if you are presenting to the class. You are responsible for not only reading all the material assigned to you, but engaging with it before class in a way that prepares you to participate in class discussion. In order to do this, you will need to take careful reading notes and review your notes before each class. The readings shall be used not only for class discussion, but also to support your arguments on the mid-term exams, presentations, and final paper.

All texts are available online as PDF documents, through this Web site and the NCSU library online reserves. A few new ones may will be also available on the Web. However, you should not rely on Internet connection. Download all texts at the beggining of the semester so you can read them on time.

Note: All students must regurlary check e-mails, as well as the class Website, for messages and readings from this course.

***

Required Readings:

Abbate, J. (1999). Popularizing the Internet. In Inventing the Internet (pp. 181-220). Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Barab, S.; Thomas, M.; Dodge, T.; Carteaux, R. & Tuzun, H. (2005). Making learning fun: Quest Atlantis, a game without guns. ETR&D, 53 (1), 86-107. Retrived January 19, 2005 from http://inkido.indiana.edu/barab/publications.html

Berners-Lee, T., Cailliau, R., Luotonen, A., Nielsen, H. F., & Secret, A. (1994). The World-Wide Web, Communications of the ACM, 37 (8), 907-912. Also available in N. Wardrip-Fruin & N. Montfort (2003) (Eds.), The new media reader (pp. 791-798). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Castells, M. (2002). The geography of the Internet: Networked places [part 1] [part 2]. In The Internet galaxy (pp. 207-246). New York: Oxford University Press.

Couclelis, H. (2007). Misses, near-misses and surprises in forecasting the informational city. In H. J. Miller (Ed.), Societies and cities in the age of instant access (pp. 70-83). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

de Souza e Silva, A. (submitted). Conceptualizing locative mobile social networks. New Media & Society.

Donath, J. S., & Viegas, F. (2002). The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces. Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS). London, England. June 2002. Retrieved May 21, 2007 from http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers.html/

Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook "friends:" Social capital and college students' use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4). Retrieved December 12, 2007, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html

Frattasi, S.; Fathi, H.; Fitzek, F.H.P.; Prasad, R.; & Katz, M.D. (2006). Defining 4G technology from the users perspective. IEEE Network, 20 (1), 35-41.

Gopal, S. (2007). The evolving social geography of blogs. In H. J. Miller (Ed.), Societies and cities in the age of instant access (pp. 275-293). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

Johnson, S. (1997). Bitmapping: an introduction. In Interface culture: how technology transforms the way we create and communicate (pp. 11-41). San Francisco: Haper Edge.

Johnson, S. (1997). The desktop. In Interface culture: how technology transforms the way we create and communicate (pp. 42-75). San Francisco: Haper Edge.

Mann, S. (1997). Wearable Computing: A First Step Toward Personal Imaging. Computer, 30 (2), 25-32. Retrieved December 13, 2007, from http://wearcam.org/ieeecomputer/r2025.htm

Murray, J. (1997). From additive to expressive form. [Part 1] [Part 2] In Hamlet on the Holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace (pp. 65-96). New York: Free Press. Book website

Rheingold, H. (2002). Always on Panopticon. In Smart mobs: The next social revolution (pp. 183-215). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.

Rheingold, H. (2002). The era of sentient things [part 1] [part 2]. In Smart mobs: The next social revolution (pp. 83-112). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.

Rheingold, H. (2002). Wireless Quilts [part 1] [part 2]. In Smart mobs: The next social revolution (pp. 133-156). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.

Robins, K. (2000). Cyberspace and the world we live in. In D. Bell & B M. Kennedy (Eds.), The Cybercultures Reader (pp. 77-95). New York: Routledge.

Schmidt, T., & Townsend, A. M. (2003). Why wireless networks want to be free. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 46 (5), 47-52. (also available at Townsend's homepage: http://urban.blogs.com/research/cacm_article.pdf

Sui, D. (2007). Paradoxical consequences of location-based services (LBS). In H. J. Miller (Ed.), Societies and cities in the age of instant access (pp. 255-271). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

Taylor, T. L. (2006). Gaming lifeworlds: Social play in persistent environments [part 1] [part 2]. In Play between worlds (pp. 21-66). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Taylor, T. L. (2003). Intentional bodies: Virtual environments and the designers who shape them," International Journal of Engineering Education, 19 (1), 25-34. (also available from T.L. Taylor's website at http://www.itu.dk/~tltaylor/papers/Taylor-Designers.pdf)

Turkle, S. (1995). A tale of two aesthetics. In Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet (pp. 29-49). New York: Simon & Schuster.

Weiser, M. & Brown, J. S. (1996). Designing calm technology. Power Grid Journal, 1(1). Retrieved April 07, 2005, from http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm

Weiser, M. (1994). The world is not a desktop. ACM Interactions, 1(1), 7-8. Retrieved April 07, 2005, from http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/ACMInteractions2.htm

Wilson, J. (2006). 3G to Web 2.0? Can Mobile Telephony Become an Architecture of Participation? Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 12(2), 229–242.

 

Recommended readings:

Benford, S., Flintham, M., Drozd, A., Anastasi, R. Rowland, D., Tandavanitj, N., et. al. (2004). Uncle Roy All Around You: Implicating the city in a location-based performance, Proceedings of the Conference on Advanced Computer Entertainment (ACE), Singapore, June 3-5. Retrieved January 19, 2006 from http://www.amutualfriend.co.uk/html/papers.html

Barkuus, L., & Dey, A. (2003). Location-based services for mobile telephony: A study of users’ privacy concerns. Proceedings of the INTERACT 2003, 9TH IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, July. Retrieved January 19, 2006 http://www.intel-research.net/berkeley/publications.asp

Bharat, R., & Minakakis, L. (2003). Evolution of mobile location-based services. Communications of the ACM, 12 (46), 61-65.

De Souza e Silva, A. (2004). Defining Cyberspace = Cybernetics + space. In From multiuser environments as (virtual) spaces to (hybrid) spaces as multiuser environments: Nomadic technology devices and hybrid communication places (pp. 20-32). Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

De Souza e Silva, A. (2004). From simulations to hybrid space: how nomadic technologies change the real. Technoetic Arts -- an international journal of speculative research, 1 (3), 209-221.

De Souza e Silva, A. (2007). Cell phones and places: The use of mobile technologies in Brazil. In H. J. Miller (Ed.), Societies and cities in the age of instant access (pp. 295-310). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

Dibbell, J. (1999). The scarlet balloon (or tinygeography, a long view and an overview). In My tiny life: crime and passion in a virtual world (pp. 39- 69). New York: Owl Books.

Hayles, N. K. (1999). Contesting for the body of information: The Macy conferences on cybernetics. In How we became post-human: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics(pp. 50-83). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Klopfer, E. Squire, K., & Jenkins, H. (2002). Environmental Detectives: PDAs as a window into a virtual simulated world. Proceedings of IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, 95- 98. Retrieved January 19, 2006 from http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/research.html

Manovich, L. (2002). The poetics of augmented space: learning from Prada. Retrived Aug. 16, 2003, from http://www.manovich.net .

Miyata, K., Boase, J., Wellman, B., & Ikeda, K. (2005) The mobile-izing Japanese: Connecting to the Internet by PC and Webphone in Yamanashi [part 1] [part 2]. In M. Ito, D. Okabe, & M. Matsuda, (Eds.), Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile phones in japanese life (pp. 143-164). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Morse, M. (1996). Nature Morte: Landscape and narrative in virtual environments. [Part 1] [Part 2] In: M. A. Moser & D. MacLeod, (Eds.), Immersed in Technology (pp. 195-232). New York: Leonardo Books.

Rhodes, B., Minar, N., & Weaver, J. (1999). Wearable Computing Meets Ubiquitous Computing:
Reaping the best of both worlds. Proceedings of The Third International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '99), San Francisco, CA, October 18-19, pp. 141-149.

Squire, K.D. (2002). Cultural Framing of Computer/Video Games. Game Studies, 2 (1). Retrieved August 31, 2005, from http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/squire/.

Taylor, T.L. (1999). Life in virtual worlds: plural existence, multi-modalities, and other online research challenges, American Behavioral Scientist, 43 (3), 435-449. Retrieved December 13, 2005, from http://www.itu.dk/people/tltaylor/cv.html

Thomas, A. (2004). Digital literacies of the cybergirl. E-Learning, 1 (3). Retrieved September 29, 2005, from http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/content/pdfs/1/issue1_3.asp#3

Turkle, S. (1995). Aspects of the self. [Part 1] [Part 2] In Life on the Screen: identity in the age of the Internet (pp. 177-209). New York: Simon & Schuster.