Everything Comes from Somewhere (Weeks 1-2)

Monday, August 20 (Week 1)

• Introduction to the syllabus and schedule overview
• Elizabeth Losh, “Theoretical Touchstones” of the Technological Imagination (2017)

Wednesday, August 22

• Carolyn Marvin, “Community and Class Order” from When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (1988), pages 63-108

Friday, August 24

• Kenneth Gergen, “The Challenge of Absent Presence” from Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance (2002), pages 227-241
• Lee Humphreys, “Social Topography in a Wireless Era: The Negotiation of Public and Private Space” from the Journal of Technical Writing & Communication (2005), pages 367-384
• Jason Farman, “When Kaleidoscopes Were as Distracting as Smartphones” from Atlas Obscura (2015)
• Sign up for a Davidson Domain (if you don’t have one already) and set up a blog for DIG 101
• In class: Introduction to blogging for DIG 101

Monday, August 27 (Week 2)

• Roy Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet” from The American Historical Review (1998), pages 1530-1552
• Blog (Round 1): Group A

Wednesday, August 29

• Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, “Where the Internet Lives: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure” from Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (2015), pages 71-93
• Blog (Round 1): Group B

Friday, August 31

• Case Study 1: The Dark Web

Header Image: 1971 map of Arpanet, courtesy of Atlas of Cyberspaces: Historical Maps of Computer Networks