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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.

Unless otherwise noted, 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.

Warning: Download/print all texts at the beggining of the semester so you can have them with you ahead of time. I won't accept late blog posts due to internet problems.

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

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Required Readings:

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

Barlow, A. (2007). The growth of the discussion board and the birth of blogs. In The rise of the blogosphere (pp. 143-152). Westport, Conn.: Praeger.

Beer, D. (2009). Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media & Society, 11 (6), 985-1002.

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.

boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Bruns, A. (2008). Wikipedia: Representations of knowledge. In Blogs, Wikipedia, Second life, and beyond: From production to produsage (pp. 101-134). New York: Peter Lang.

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

Ceruzzi, P. (2003). Augmenting human intellect, 1975-1985. In A history of modern computing (pp. 243-280). Cambridge, MA: The MIT 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., & Frith, J. (in press). Locative mobile social networks: Merging communication, location and urban spaces. Mobilities.

Dibbell, J. (1998). The scarlet balloon (Or tinygeography, a long view and an overview). In My tinylife: Crime and passion in a virtual world (pp. 39-72). New York: Owl Books.

Gordon, E., & de Souza e Silva, A. (in press). Network Locality: Putting location back into the picture. In Network Locality: How the Internet is Making Us Location Aware and How We Are Doing the Same to It. New Jersey: Blackwell Wiley.

Greenfield, A. (2006). Section I: What is everyware? [part 1] [part 2] in Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing (pp. 9-34). Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

Hameri, A-P., & Nordberg, M. (2003). From experience: Linking available resources and technologies to create a solution for document sharing--The early years of the WWW. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 15 (4), 322-334.

Humphreys, L. (2007). Mobile social networks and social practice: A case study of Dodgeball. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1), article 17. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/humphreys.html

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

Kim, K.-H., & Yun, H. (2007). Cying for me, Cying for us: Relational dialectics in a Korean social network site. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1), article 15. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kim.yun.html?

Mortensen, T. E. (2006). WoW is the new MUD: Social gaming from text to video. Games and Culture, 1 (4), 397-413.

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. (2000). Visionaries and convergences: The accidental history of the net. In The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier (pp. 57-108). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Sassi, S. (2005). Cultural differentiation of social segregation? Four approaches to the digital divide. New Media & Society, 7 (5), 684-700.

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.

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.

Film:

Rusnak, J. (Director) (1999). The Thirteenth Floor [Motion Picture]. United States: Centropolis Film Productions.