Readings for the Spring 2010 Semester

Dr. Jelena Karanovic
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Media, Culture and Communication
New York University

Week 1: What do we mean by digital media?
- Lev Manovich. 2001. What is New Media? In The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Ginsburg, Faye. 2008. Rethinking the Digital Age. In The Media and Social Theory, 127-144. David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee, eds. New York: Routledge.
Recommended: Wyatt, Sally. 2008. Challenging the Digital Imperative.

Week 2: Novelty and obsolescence of digital media
Make an appointment with me to discuss your interests and ideas for the final project in this course.
Session 1
- Bolter, J. David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Introduction and Chapter 1. In Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Recommended: Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey Pingree, eds. 2003. Introduction, in New Media, 1740-1915. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Session 2
- Sterne, Jonathan. 2007. Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media. In Residual Media. Charles Acland, ed. 16-31. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Parks, Lisa. 2004. Kinetic Screens: Epistemologies of Movement at the Interface. In MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, 37-57. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, eds. London: Routledge.
- Check out the Basel Action Network website, http://www.ban.org

Week 3: Utopianism and histories of digital media
Session 1
- Turner, Fred. (2006) How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology: Lessons from the First Hacker’s Conference. In Critical Cyberculture Studies, 257-269. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari, eds. New York: NYU Press.
- Goldsmith, Jack L., and Tim Wu. 2006. Preface and Introduction. In Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of Borderless World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Session 2
- Edwards, Paul. 1996. Chapter 2: Why Build Computers? In The Closed World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Light, Jennifer. 1999. When Computers Were Women. Technology and Culture 40: 455-483.
Recommended: Abbate, Janet. 1999. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Recommended: Turner, Fred. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Week 4: Snow day and President’s Day. No class.

Week 5
Session 1 – Ambiguities of copying
- Powers, Richard. 2001. The Artist’s Bedlam. In Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, 476-477. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds. Boston: MIT Press.
- Meiselas, Susan and Joy Garnet. 2007. On the rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the art of context. Harper’s Magazine 53-58.
- Manjoo, Farhad. 2004. A picture is no longer worth a thousand words. Salon.com. Available online: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/04/22/doctored_photos/print.html
In-class screening: Berger, John. 1972. “Ways of Seeing.” Clips.
Recommended: Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968 (1936).

Session 2 – Archive
- Manovich, Lev. 2001. Database as a Symbolic Form.
- Bowker, Geoffrey, and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. What a Difference a Name Makes—The Classification of Nursing Work. In Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Christie, Michael. 2008. Digital Tools and the Management of Australian Aboriginal Desert Knowledge. In Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics. Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart, eds. Durham: Duke University Press.

Week 6
Session 1 – Archive continued
Visiting speaker: Cindy Jeffers
- Nunberg, Geoffrey. 2009. Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars. Chronicle of Higher Education.
- Brin, Sergey. 2009. “A Library to Last Forever.” The New York Times.
- Darnton, Robert. 2009. “Google & the Future of Books.” The New York Review of Books.

Session 2 – Network
Your first paper assignment is due.
- Barabási, Albert-László. 2002. Linked: The New Science of Networks, 41-63 and 160-178. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.
- van Loon, Joost. 2006. Network. Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2-3: 307-314.

Week 7
Session 1 – Networked peer production
- Benkler, Yochai, and Christian Ahlert. 2006. Mining the Wealth of Networks
 with Yochai Benkler.
- Baker, Nicholson. 2008. The Charms of Wikipedia. The New York Review of Books 55 (4).
- Rosenzweig, Roy. 2006. Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. The Journal of American History 93 (1): 117-46.

Session 2 – Enforcing property claims in technological design
- Gillespie, Tarleton. 2006. “Designed to ‘Effectively Frustrate’: Copyright, Technology, and the Agency of Users.” New Media & Society 8: 651-669.
- Sterne, Jonathan. 2006. “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact.” New Media & Society 8: 825-842.

Week 8
Session 1 – Contesting property claims
- Check out the following three websites:

http://www.futureofmusic.org

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

http://wiki.freeculture.org/Free_Culture_Manifesto

- Check out the website and the FAQ of the film “Sita Sings the Blues,” available at http://www.sitasingstheblues.com
Film screening: Paley, Nina. 2009. “Sita Sings the Blues.” Clips.
Recommended: Vaidhyanathan, Siva. 2003. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: The NYU Press.

Session 2 – High-tech labor and transnational mobility
- Xiang, Biao. 2005. Gender, Dowry and the Migration System of Indian Information Technology Professionals. Indian Journal of Gender Studies 12: 357-380.
Recommended: Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. Disjuncture and difference in the global culture economy. Theory, Culture, and Society 7: 295-310.
Recommended: Freeman, Carla. 2000. High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press.

SPRING BREAK, March 15-20

Week 9
Session 1 – Gaming and transnational virtual labor
- Dibbell, Julian. 2007. The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer. New York Times, June 17, 2007.
- Check out the filmmaker Ge Jin’s website, http://www.chinesegoldfarmers.com.

Session 2 – Free labor
- Klinenberg 2005, Convergence: News Production in a Digital Age. The Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science 597:48-64.
- Postigo, Hector. 2003. Emerging Sources of Labor on the Internet: The Case of America Online Volunteers. International Review of Social History 48: 205-223.
- Scholz, Trebor. 2009. What the MySpace generation should know about working for free.

Week 10
Session 1 – Stretching the ties of kinship and nation
- Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. 2002. Relationships. In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Recommended: Bernal, Victoria. 2005. Eritrea On-line: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and the Public Sphere. American Ethnologist 32(4): 660-675.

Session 2 – Coding class, gender, sexuality, and race
A complete draft of your final paper is due for peer review.
- Hargittai, Eszter. 2008. The Digital Reproduction of Inequality. In Social Stratification, 936-944. Ed. David Grusky. Boulder: Westview Press.
- Kendall, Lori. 2002. Hanging Out in the Virtual Locker Room: BlueSky as a Masculine Space. In Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online, 71-108. University of California Press.
- Lisa Nakamura. 2007. Measuring Race on the Internet. In Digitizing Race. 171-201. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Recommended: Orgad, Shani. (2005) The Transformative Potential of Online Communication: The Case of Breast Cancer Patients’ Internet Spaces. Feminist Media Studies 5 (2): 141-161.

Week 11
Session 1 – Age and digital skills
- Ito, Mizuko et al. 2008. Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. Chicago: McArthur Foundation, 2008.
- Vaidhyanathan, Siva. 2009. Generational Myth. Chronicle of Higher Education.

Session 2 – Intimacy and surveillance
Your peer review is due in class (along with the copy of the paper that you reviewed).
- Thompson, Clive. 2008. Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. The New York Times, September 7, 2008.
- Collins, Lauren. 2008. Friend Game. The New Yorker, January 21, 2008.

Week 12: Technologies of personhood
- Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Chapter 1 in Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
In-class film screening: Matulick, Shelley. 2006. Our Brilliant Second Life.
- Reed, Adam. 2005. “’My Blog Is Me’: Texts and Persons in UK Online Journal Culture (and Anthropology).” Ethnos 70 (2): 220-242.

Weeks 13 and 14 – Student conference
Your blog portfolios are due.
Your final paper is due.