Coursenotes, Material Culture

Coursenotes SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture, Week 6

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SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture

Week 6, October 8 2014
Phase II

Project

Part I

  • Due at midnight
  • Feedback to buildup
  • Keep on going on

Parts II and III

Doing sociology and/or anthropology from object

Pretty Open

  • Can be straight up “paper”
  • Can be creative
  • Can be ethnographic
  • Can be experimental
  • Can be content-based
  • Can be quantitative

Well-Informed

  • Academic literature
  • Cite, quote, pay lipservice, and dig deeper
  • Notice patterns
  • Academic dialogue
  • Still empirical

Material Culture as Field

  • Sociology and/or anthropology
  • STS, SCoT, ANT, affordances, consumer culture, sociology of art, taste, archæology, folkloristics, cultural studies, sociomateriality, museum studies, art history, politics of artefacts, sensory anthropology…
  • Assemblage, bricolage, mix, blend

Part II: Presentation

  • More than “show and tell”
  • Sharing
  • Working together
  • Peer-learning
  • May be small group
  • Schedule soon

Core Texts: Prell and Van Osch

  • Case studies
  • Methodology and approaches
  • SCoT on actors and sociomateriality through affordances
  • Less about physical objects
  • Even nonmaterial artefacts (words, software)

Prell

Prell Wordcloud

technology, technological, actors, design, scot, frame, bijker, community, artifact, semiotic, frames, material

Van Osch

Van Osch Wordcloud

affordances, application, generativity, artifact, interactions, applications, visualization, material, artifacts, sociomateriality, sociomaterial, generative, generation, actors

Coursenotes, Cyberspace Sociology

Coursenotes SOCI221 – Sociology of Cyberspace, Week 5

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SOCI221 –Sociology of Cyberspace

Meeting 5: October 6, 2014
From Social Dynamics to Midsemester

Social Networks

Network Graph

By Dusk Eagle CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0

Logistics

  • Contributions Self-Assessement due October 13
    • Active learning
    • Rarely modified
  • Peer-ratings
  • Midterm on October 20
    • Doing sociology with Internet
    • Talk after break

Past Week

Social Dynamics

Activity: Digital Inclusion

  • Relevant factors?
  • Experiences?
  • Diversity of perspectives?

Required Texts

  • Latour, Bruno. “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network Theorist.” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 796–810. http://lar.me/2-o
  • Kreiss, D., M. Finn, and F. Turner. “The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society.” New Media & Society 13, no. 2 (October 12, 2010): 243–259. doi:10.1177/1461444810370951. http://lar.me/2-p

Latour

Latour, Bruno. “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network Theorist.” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 796–810. http://lar.me/2-o

  • Network society?
  • Classical sociology?
  • Agency?

Kreiss et al.

Kreiss, D., M. Finn, and F. Turner. “The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society.” New Media & Society 13, no. 2 (October 12, 2010): 243–259. doi:10.1177/1461444810370951. http://lar.me/2-p

  • Bureaucracy
  • Peer production vs. prosumption
  • Dialogue

Coming Up…

Midsemester

Activity: Network Graph

  • Make a list of ten people with whom you interact on a regular basis (friends, family, coworkers…)
  • Give an initial to each of these people.
  • Separately, list or map out the relationships between these people. Who knows whom?
  • What can you say about this social graph? Is it a dense network? Are you the only person connecting this group?
  • Post a brief thought about this graph.

Contributions

  • Grade on 10 and quick explanation
  • Extra mile? Made a difference?
  • Not attendance or expected work.
  • Not really assignment.
  • May change grade if really out of whack.

Midterm

  • Short answers (a sentence or two): two points each, probably four out of six
  • Open questions (a paragraph): three points each, probably four out of six
  • Apply concepts (e.g. “prosumption” on Facebook?)
  • Show you really understand: explain to somebody else
  • Broader issues, topics, concepts on doing sociology with the Internet

After Midterm

Social Inequalities

Required Texts

Van Dijk, Jan AGM. “Inequalities in the Network Society.” In Digital Sociology: Critical Perspectives, edited by Kate Orton-Johnson and Nick Prior, 105–124. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Kendall, Lori. “Meaning and Identity in ‘Cyberspace’: The Performance of Gender, Class, and Race Online.” Symbolic Interaction 21, no. 2 (May 1998): 129–153. doi:10.1525/si.1998.21.2.129.

Van Dijk

Van Dijk, Jan AGM. “Inequalities in the Network Society.” In Digital Sociology: Critical Perspectives, edited by Kate Orton-Johnson and Nick Prior, 105–124. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

  • Digital Democracy
  • Social Network Analysis

Kendall

Kendall, Lori. “Meaning and Identity in ‘Cyberspace’: The Performance of Gender, Class, and Race Online.” Symbolic Interaction 21, no. 2 (May 1998): 129–153. doi:10.1525/si.1998.21.2.129.

Coursenotes, Material Culture

SOCI/ANTH 441 Coursenotes, Week 5

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Pickering WordCloud

Pickering

Pickering, Lucy (2010) “Toilets, Bodies, Selves: Enacting Composting as Counterculture in Hawai’i”, Body & Society 16(4): 33–55, doi:10.1177/1357034X10383882.

Pickering as Corpus

Distinctive words

toilets (83), toilet (67), composting (31), state (31), water (29).

Selected Terms

Toilets, toilet, composting, state, bodies, water, faeces, body, waste, defecation, urine, dirt, matter, flush, urination, sewers, land, bathrooms, sewer, plumbed, urinating, soil, rejection, home, drop, critique, trees, shit, modern, homes, compost, clean, bodily, sewage, self, privacy, polluting, pee, interior, food, covered, technology, embodied, electricity, waste, tree, technologies, plumbing, plastic, outside, enacting, enacted, dirty, buckets, sites, purified, porous, pollution, plants, nitrogen, materiality, material, leaky, grow, flows, faecal, excrement, enactment, dirt, defecate, closets, cannabis, zizek, venice, unclean, shavings, porousness, pipe, pipes, permeable, organic, materials, lavatories, houses, gardening, fertilizer, excretions, excremental, environment, enactments, dug, design, defecating, contamination, closet, civilization, water-heavy, tub, supermodern, stall, squat, sprays, solid, smells, shallow, septic, selves, scoop, rejected, recycling, receptacles, porcelain, places, placedness, outfalls, outdoors, nutrients, modern’, modernity’, leakiness, lava, indoor, hand-built, growth, goods, gallon, fruit, foods, flushed, fluids, floor, fissure, farmers, exuviae, exposed, expelled, excreta, encountering, embody, drainage, dirty, digestive, defecatory, decorated, cup, crochet, covers, coffee, clean’, cleanliness, cleaned, caravans, beans, rejecting, modernity, anti-modern

Themes and Threads

  • Waste and dirt beyond Douglas
  • Matter, substance
  • Environment, nature, space, sites, location
  • Body, embodiment, enactment
  • Toilet technology
  • (Super/Hyper/Liquid)Modern state
  • Cultural diversity

Suggested Complements

  • Postcolonial Studies 5(2)
  • Gordon, B. (2003) “Embodiment, Community Building, and Aesthetic Saturation in ‘Restroom World,’ a Backstage Women’s Space” Journal of American Folklore 116(462): 444–464, DOI:10.1353/jaf.2003.0061
  • Kundera, M. (1984) The Unbearable Lightness of Being. London: Faber and Faber.
  • Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  • Žižek, S. (1997) The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.
  • Mol, A. and J. Law (2004) ‘Embodied Action, Enacting Bodies: The Example of Hypoglycaemia’, Body & Society 10(2–3): 43–62.
Coursenotes, Cyberspace Sociology

Coursenotes, SOCI221 Week 4

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SOCI221 –Sociology of Cyberspace

Meeting 4: September 29, 2014
From Social Structure to Social Dynamics

Social Structure

1984 Social Classes

By IAMTHEEGGMAN, AnonMoos, Stannered, Public domain

Past Week

Social Structure

Online Activity: Geek Test

  • Geekness
  • Popular Culture
  • Identity
  • Geeks in social contexts

Required Texts

  • Ritzer, G., and N. Jurgenson. (2010) “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer’.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10 (1): 13–36. doi:10.1177/1469540509354673. http://joc.sagepub.com/content/10/1/13.short
  • Warschauer, M., and T. Matuchniak. (2010) “New Technology and Digital Worlds: Analyzing Evidence of Equity in Access, Use, and Outcomes.” Review of Research in Education 34(1): 179–225. doi:10.3102/0091732X09349791. http://rre.sagepub.com/content/34/1/179

Ritzer

Ritzer, G., and N. Jurgenson. (2010) “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer’.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10 (1): 13–36. doi:10.1177/1469540509354673. http://joc.sagepub.com/content/10/1/13.short

  • Prosumption
  • Postindustrial?
  • Consumer society
  • Product or consumer/user/producer?

Warschauer

Warschauer, M., and T. Matuchniak. (2010) “New Technology and Digital Worlds: Analyzing Evidence of Equity in Access, Use, and Outcomes.” Review of Research in Education 34(1): 179–225. doi:10.3102/0091732X09349791. http://rre.sagepub.com/content/34/1/179

  • Usage
  • Digital Divide(s)
  • 21st Century Learning Skills

Next Week

Social Dynamics

Activity: Digital Inclusion

  • Divide in small groups (by numbers)
  • Scenario: a schoolboard meeting during which digital inclusion is discussed, a policy is devised to ensure that all students have equal opportunities for success in a digital world.
  • Advising: Based on what you’ve seen so far in the course, what should this policy take into account? What are the relevant criteria, factors, dimensions? What insight can sociology give, in this case?
  • Feel free to use an actual example from your own experience or to create a fictional case from your diverse experiences.
  • Each member of your group should post something about this activity.

Required Texts

  • Latour, Bruno. “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network Theorist.” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 796–810. http://lar.me/2-o
  • Kreiss, D., M. Finn, and F. Turner. “The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society.” New Media & Society 13, no. 2 (October 12, 2010): 243–259. doi:10.1177/1461444810370951. http://lar.me/2-p

Latour

Latour, Bruno. “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network Theorist.” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 796–810. http://lar.me/2-o

  • Playful but potentially difficult
  • Philosophical (onthology)
  • Actor-Network Theory (ANT) vs. classical sociology
  • Context: International Seminar on Network Theory (Manuel Castells)
  • Deep on “network”
  • Agency

Kreiss et al.

Kreiss, D., M. Finn, and F. Turner. “The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society.” New Media & Society 13, no. 2 (October 12, 2010): 243–259. doi:10.1177/1461444810370951. http://lar.me/2-p

  • Bureaucracy
    • Weber
    • Rational-legal authority
    • Iron cage
  • Peer-production
    • Web 2.0
    • Participatory culture
    • Link to prosumption
  • Polemic
    • Rhetoric
    • Reply to Benkler, Jenkins, etc. (conversation with interlocutors)
  • Making links
    • Identify common names
    • Threads between texts
Coursenotes, Cyberspace Sociology

Coursenotes SOCI221 Week 3

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SOCI221/2AA – Sociology of Cyberspace

Meeting 3
September 22, 2014
Geeks and Nerds by Randall Munroe CC-BY-NC
Geeks and Nerds by Randall Munroe CC-BY-NC

Logistics

  • “Definitive” class list
  • Two class meetings before Thanksgiving and Midterm
    • Social Structure (September 29)
    • Social Dynamics (October 6)
  • End class with preparation for next
  • Required texts
  • Activities

Past Week

Introducing Cyberculture

Required Texts

Silver, David. “Looking Backwards, Looking Forward; Cyberculture Studies 1990–2000.” Web Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age. Oxford University Press, 2000. http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp
Turner, Fred. “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community.” Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (2005): 485–512. doi:10.1353/tech.2005.0154. http://lar.me/2zb

Silver

Silver, David. “Looking Backwards, Looking Forward; Cyberculture Studies 1990–2000.” Web Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age. Oxford University Press, 2000. http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp

Cyberculture Studies

  • Cyberspace as hallucination
  • Frontier mentality
  • Social groups
  • Introducing ‘Net to journalists
  • Technophilia and Technophobia
    • Enthusiasm and anxiety
    • Geeks and Luddites
  • Democracy
  • Distributed intelligence
  • Hypertext

Turner

Turner, Fred. “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community.” Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (2005): 485–512. doi:10.1353/tech.2005.0154. http://lar.me/2zb

Counterculture/Cyberculture

Interior, Further / Furthur, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters famous bus, Hempfest 2010, Myrtle Edwards Park, Seattle, Washington, 2010, at which time it had recently been restored.
Further/Furthur 19
By Joe Mabel.

Interior, “Further” / “Furthur”, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ famous bus, Hempfest 2010, Myrtle Edwards Park, Seattle, Washington, 2010, at which time it had recently been restored.

New Communalists

  • War and Peace
  • Communes
  • Utopias
  • “Community” in strong sense (“disembodied tribe”, “transcendent collective”…)
  • West Coast, European-American, college-educated Baby Boomers
  • Collaboration and horizontality
  • Medium and networks
  • Employment, reputation, expertise
  • Shift to business
  • Subversion, recuperation, reappropriation

Crash Course

Sociology in a Few Minutes (or Refresher)

Sociology Bullets

  • WMDs: Weber, Marx, Durkheim http://lar.me/wmd
    • Symbolic Interactionism, Conflict Theory, Functionalism
    • Dialogue, Inequality, Stability
  • Group, socialization, role, status…
  • Power, control, conformity, norms, deviance
  • Culture, subculture, counterculture
  • Feminism as key
  • “Who Decides?” as key question
  • Structure and Agency

Next Week

Social Structure

Online Activity: Geek Test

  • Take one of the following “geek tests”:
  • Post something about your results or about the test itself.

Required Texts

Ritzer, G., and N. Jurgenson. (2010) “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer’.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10 (1): 13–36. doi:10.1177/1469540509354673. http://joc.sagepub.com/content/10/1/13.short
Warschauer, M., and T. Matuchniak. (2010) “New Technology and Digital Worlds: Analyzing Evidence of Equity in Access, Use, and Outcomes.” Review of Research in Education 34(1): 179–225. doi:10.3102/0091732X09349791. http://rre.sagepub.com/content/34/1/179

Ritzer

Ritzer, G., and N. Jurgenson. (2010) “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer’.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10 (1): 13–36. doi:10.1177/1469540509354673. http://joc.sagepub.com/content/10/1/13.short

Ritzer

  • Author of The McDonaldization of Society (1993)
  • Sociology of production, consumption, and prosumption
  • Change to postindustrial society
  • Web as context and hope more than focus

Warschauer

Warschauer, M., and T. Matuchniak. (2010) “New Technology and Digital Worlds: Analyzing Evidence of Equity in Access, Use, and Outcomes.” Review of Research in Education 34(1): 179–225. doi:10.3102/0091732X09349791. http://rre.sagepub.com/content/34/1/179

Warschauer

  • Known for Digital Divide
    • Representative of studies
  • Beyond access
  • Data-heavy
    • Almost “meta-analysis”
    • Can skip details
  • Focus on sections (out of school use, 21st Century Learning Skills…)
  • Study smart
  • Collaborative studying
Coursenotes, Material Culture

Coursenotes: SOCI/ANTH 441, Week 4

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Griswold et al.

Griswold, Wendy, Gemma Mangione, and Terence E. McDonnell. “Objects, Words, and Bodies in Space: Bringing Materiality into Cultural Analysis.” Qualitative Sociology 36, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 343–64. doi:10.1007/s11133–013–9264–6.

Terms

Wordcloud for Griswold et al. 2013
Wordcloud for Griswold et al. 2013

Distinctive Words

art (78), objects (67), museum (37), position (36), exhibition (30)

Selected Words

art, objects, museum, position, visitors, exhibition, work, material, labels, physical, materiality, location, object, experience, space, bodies, museums, sculpture, interaction, distance, label, gallery, viewers, meaning-making, corridor, audiences, interactions, encounter, curators, sts, shape, floor, exhibitions, actors, wall, viewer, legibility, interact, green, artworks, ant, actants, presuppositions, non-human, light, latour, cognition, affordances, visitor, interpret, exhibit, dance, create, attention, agency, spaces, shapes, guides, game, encounters, arcangels, sculptures, room, orientation, network, mediating, locate, interplay, installations, hand, ground, golf, focus, environments, engagement, desk, curatorial, bodily, akrich, actor-network, positions, photographs, photo, pedestal, ledger, hennion, galleries, cues, body, artwork, arrangement, perceptible, orient, observing, nudes, materials, laboratory, interacts, gibson, eyes, encountering, emplacement, embedded, elevator, design, cueing, cue, collection, choreography, bourdieu, audio-guide, arrangements, agents, affords, afford, affect

Corpus

http://voyant-tools.org/?skin=simple&corpus=1411329616895.1911&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt

STS

  • From sociology of science to cultural sociology
  • Actor-Network Theory
  • Social Construction of Technology

Museums

  • Museum Studies
  • Curatorial work
  • Visitor Studies
  • Position and location
  • Arts

Cognition

  • Perception
  • Meaning-making
  • Disposition
  • Inter-individual

Selected References

Akrich, Appadurai, Becker, Bijker, Bourdieu, Callon, de la Fuente, DeNora, Gell, Gibson, Hebdige, Hennion, Hetherington, Keane, Knorr-Cetina, Latour, Law, Lynch, Pinch, Prior

Coursenotes, Material Culture

Coursenotes: SOCI/ANTH 441 Week 3 (Draft)

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Wordcloud for Bates 2012
Wordcloud for Bates 2012
Word trends in Bates 2012
Word trends in Bates 2012

Baglama turc manche long.jpg
“Baglama turc manche long“. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Bates Terms

objects, material, makers, wood, construction, agency, bowl, organology, object, networks, meanings, body, golem, woods, mulberry, things, strings, museum, making, maker, fabrika, chestnut, workshop, tool, museums, matter, kinesthesis, tools, thing-power, sts, production, network, embodiment, clay, classification, atölye, articulated, workshops, trees, string, spruce, sensoriums, r-making, pinch, organograms, neighborhood, materials, latour, kinesthetics, kinesthetic, houses, homes, craft, conservatories, carving, assemblages, assemblage, agentive, actor-network, actants, tree, saz-making, saz-maker, lyra-makers, households, hardwoods, handtools, embodied, classificatory, classifications, violin-maker, tanbur-making, networksthe, music-making, maker-customer, instrument-maker, house, fruitwoods, factory, factories, embodies, classify, atölye-like, articulate, actor-networks


























































































References

Material Culture

Reserve

  • Appadurai
  • Gell
  • Latour
  • Vannini
  • Woodward

Others

  • Bijker
  • Callon
  • Law
  • Miller
  • Pinch
  • Riggins
  • Straw

Music and Organology

  • Barz
  • Berliner
  • DeVale
  • Dournon
  • Hood
  • Hornbostel
  • Kartomi
  • Qureshi
  • Rice
  • Sachs

Fiction

  • Melville
  • Proulx
Coursenotes, Cyberspace Sociology

Coursenotes: SOCI221 Meeting 2

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SOCI221/2AA – Sociology of Cyberspace

Meeting 2: History

September 15, 2014
Slides: http://slides.com/enkerli/soci221mtg2

Logistics

  • Online texts
  • Need to be on campus, in most cases
  • Can download all at once
    Can do VPN http://lar.me/vpnconu
  • Also coursepack volume, H–1132, library…
  • References on Moodle

Work for the Course

  • Contributions (degree of engagement, putting yourself in…)
  • Reflection posts (working with material, sharing insight…)
  • Activities (hands-on, put into practice…)
  • Exams (define concepts, explain position, contrast terms…)

Podcasts

This Past Week

  • “Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.” – Kevin Kelly, via Stowe Boyd http://lar.me/1at

Online History Activity

  • Noticed Patterns?
  • What has changed?
  • Has society changed in sync?

Required Texts

  • Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly, 1945. http://lar.me/2z8
  • Leiner, Barry M. et al. “A Brief History of the Internet.” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 39, no. 5 (2009): 22. doi:10.1145/1629607.1629613. http://lar.me/2–9

Vannevar Bush

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly, 1945. http://lar.me/2z8

Technology and Prospective

  • War context
  • Knowledge Management
    • Power of intellect
    • Shoulder of Giants
  • Scale

End of an Era?

  • Industrial Era
    • Productivity
    • Rationality
  • Post-industrial
    • Hyperproductivity
    • Knowledge work (call centres…)
    • Information Overload
    • Getting Things Done (GTD) http://lar.me/2-a

Engineering mindset

Inspiration

Leiner et al.

Leiner, Barry M., Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, and Stephen Wolff. “A Brief History of the Internet.” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 39, no. 5 (2009): 22. http://lar.me/2–9

Internet Infrastructure

  • Plumbing
    • Commodity
    • Reliability
    • Scalability
    • Flow
  • Information Technology
  • Academics
    • Open publication
    • Vendors and inventors

Internet Infrastructure

  • Beyond Web
  • Finances
  • Social aspect
    • Email
    • Community
  • Political Aspect
    • Who decides?
      • “Core group of designers”
      • Global Inequalities

Sociology Crash Course

  • WMDs: Weber, Marx, Durkheim http://lar.me/wmd
    • Symbolic Interactionism, Conflict Theory, Functionalism
    • Dialogue, Inequality, Stability
  • Group, socialization, role, status…
  • Power, control, conformity, norms, deviance
  • Culture, subculture, counterculture
  • Feminism as key

Cyberspace Background

Cyberspace Precursors

  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  • Charles Babbage
  • Alan Turing
  • Norbert Weiner 1948 “Cybernetics”
  • J.C.R. Licklider 1962 “Intergalactic Computer Network”
  • Vernor Vinge 1981 “Cyberspace”

Macy Conferences

The Macy Conference Core

  • http://lar.me/2za
  • Gregory Bateson
  • Lawrence K. Frank
  • Frank Fremont-Smith
  • Margaret Mead
  • Arturo Rosenblueth
  • Warren McCulloch

The Macy Conference Attendees

  • Lawrence Kubie
  • Walter Pitts
  • Paul Lazarsfeld
  • John von Neumann
  • Norbert Wiener
  • Clyde Kluckhohn
  • Roman Jakobson
  • Claude Shannon

Macy Subconference

  • Talcott Parsons
  • Robert Merton

Making Links

Cyberspace Mindmap
(PDF version)

Next Week

Cultural Background

Online Exercise/Activity: Before and After

  • Pick a topic related to social change in an online world (education, dating, labour, publishing, networking…).
  • Find someone who lived through a transition to an online world.
  • Ask that person about the change topic, describing a bit of the context for the course.
  • Share a quick piece of insight from that interaction, not giving away any personal detail.

Required Texts

  • Silver, David. “Looking Backwards, Looking Forward; Cyberculture Studies 1990–2000.” Web Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age. Oxford University Press, 2000. http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp
  • Turner, Fred. “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community.” Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (2005): 485–512. doi:10.1353/tech.2005.0154. http://lar.me/2zb

Silver

Silver, David. “Looking Backwards, Looking Forward; Cyberculture Studies 1990–2000.” Web Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age. Oxford University Press, 2000. http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp

Silver

  • Three phases in Cyberculture studies
  • Enthusiasm to critical thinking
  • Frontier mentality (Web’s soul, “perpetual beta”, libertarianism…)
  • Globalization
  • Conformity
  • Hypertext to UI/UX

Turner

Turner, Fred. “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community.” Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (2005): 485–512. doi:10.1353/tech.2005.0154. http://lar.me/2zb

Turner

  • Counterculture
    • Peace
    • Community
    • Capitalism
  • Howard Rheingold
    • Virtual Community

Stewart Brand

  • Merry Pranksters
  • Whole Earth Catalog
  • The WELL
  • Global Business Network (GBN)
  • Long Now Foundation
Furthur, Photo by Joe Mabel
Furthur, Photo by Joe Mabel

Furthur, Photo by Joe Mabel

Acid Test

 

Coursenotes, Material Culture

SOCI/ANTH 441 – Material Culture – Week 2: September 10, 2014

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SOCI/ANTH 441/2A – Material Culture

Week 2: September 10, 2014

Today

  • Project
  • DiSalvo
  • Magaudda
  • Library session

Working Together

Project

Have you thought about an object?

Part I: Description (October 8)

Questions to ask (of) the object

Object Phenomenology

  • What is it?
  • What are its features?
  • What are its parts, components, materials?
  • How does it feel, smell, sound, look, or even taste?
  • How can it be characterized, categorized, typologized?
  • How is it made, built?

Object Life

  • What is its history?
  • Who has made it, transformed it, distributed it?
  • When was it made?
  • What are its antecedents, ancestors, prerequisites?
  • Where does it come from?
  • Where is it heading?

Object Value

  • What does it mean, represent, signify?
  • What is it worth, to whom?
  • How does it compare to similar objects?
  • What can it do, how can it be used?
  • What does it afford?

Dumit’s Dimensions

  • http://web.mit.edu/dumit/www/artifact.htm
  • symbolic, labor, professional, material, technological, political, economic, textual, bodily, historical
  • context, educational, political, mythological, symbolic, labor, professional, material, technological, economic, textual, bodily

Past Week: DiSalvo

Core Text

What did you notice?

Complementary Texts

Other angles on DiSalvo?

Next Week: Magaudda

Magaudda WordCloud

WordCloud for Magaudda

Magaudda Terms

music, practices, practice, consumption, digital, material, objects, ipod, materiality, process, changes, cultural, consumer, circuit, change, object, devices, listening, digitalization, processes, meanings, personal, appropriation, technologies, reconfiguration, dematerialization, sense, listeners, experience, integration, adoption, technology, records, record, gift, computer, performative, culture, articulation, players, formats, consumers, transformation, sts, shift, portable, obsolete, materialities, experiences, everyday, embodied, diffusion, values, value, interviews, emergence, cultures, connected, accessories, adaptation

Context

  • Digital economy (Anderson)
  • Anthropology of consumption (McCracken)
  • STS: Science and Technology Studies (Bijker, Pinch…)
  • ANT: Actor-Network Theory (Latour, Callon, Law)

Further Context

  • Immaterial vs. material
  • Commodification of music
  • Practices and objects
  • Appropriation
  • Circuit of practice

Complementary Texts

  • Texts cited by Magaudda (Bijker, Dant, Douglas, Kopytoff, Latour, Miller, Orlikowski, Pinch, Ritzer, Shove, Vannini)
  • Texts citing Magaudda
Coursenotes, Cyberspace Sociology

Coursenotes: SOCI221, Week 1

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SOCI221/2AA – Sociology of Cyberspace

Meeting 1: September 8, 2014

Today

  • Getting acquainted
  • Knowing what to expect
  • Exercises
  • Prepare for next week

Getting to Know One Another

Building Connections

Classroom activities: you have/had to be there…

Discussion

What can sociology provide in the study of Internet?

Exercise

Online History

  • Go back to your early online history
  • What has changed?
  • Post something short

Call Me Alex

Alex’s Info

Alex’s “Cyberspace” Biography

  • Twenty Years Online
  • Pre–1993: Dabbling
  • Since 1993: Intense
  • Social media involvement
  • Geek ethnographer
  • Social Web course
  • Community manager

Alex’s Teaching

  • Diversified teaching
  • Constructivism
  • Applied work: participatory action research
  • Emphasis on appropriation

Active Learning

Gym Analogy

  • Own project
  • Effort, practice, and improvement
  • Personal trainer, not coach, drill sergeant, or employer
  • Ask questions

Peer Learning

  • Mutual help
  • Culture of sharing (“gift economy”)
  • Diigo
  • Interactions
  • Peer assessment
  • Forums

Teaching as Community Management

  • Building learning environment together
  • Community?
  • Enabling action
  • Learning network

This Course

Sociology of Cyberspace

What Do We Mean by “Cyberspace”?

Social dimensions

  • Geek Culture
  • Digital divide
  • Inequality
  • Class
  • Gender
  • Race
  • Democracy
  • “Digital Natives”
  • Education
  • Digital literacy
  • Diversity
  • Digital ethnography
  • Posthumanism
  • Appropriation
  • Communities
  • Social identity

This Semester

  • Somewhat hands-on
  • Exercises
  • No need for technical skills
  • Critical thinking

Coursepack

  • All texts available online
  • Diverse
  • Deep sociology
  • Average of two texts per week
  • Study smart: skim then focus
  • Texts as toolbox
  • Find something to share, to discuss

Course Policies

  • Contributions
  • Regular attendance expected
  • Online submissions before class
  • Late penalty
  • No extra credit

Contributions

  • What do you bring to the course, apart from what’s expected?
  • Active
  • Not necessarily “vocal”
  • Not necessarily in-class
  • Partly self-assessed (October 13)

Reflection Posts

  • Sociological insight
  • Active reading: toolbox, conversation starters
  • Making links
  • Outside sources (including videos, tweets, pictures…)
  • Aggregate grade (on 20) by Alex, at the end
  • Ok if miss one

Qualitative peer-assessment

  • Excellent: ~90%
  • Very Good: ~80%
  • Good: ~70%
  • Average: ~60%
  • Not Good Enough: ~50%
  • Disappointing: ~40%

Activities/Exercises

  • Some start in class
  • More hands-on, informal
  • Also qualitative peer-assessment
  • Aggregate grade (on 10) by Alex, at the end
  • Ok if miss one

Exams

  • Essay-type questions, but shorter
  • Compare and contrast, support argument…
  • In-class midterm (October 20)
  • University-scheduled final

Coming Up

Context Is Key

Required Texts

Vannevar Bush

As We May Think

Pre-Internet

  • From destruction to knowledge
  • Technology and the mind
  • Prospective
  • Memex
  • Partial inspiration for the Internet

Leiner et al.

Brief History of the Internet

Historical Background

  • Time depth
  • Technological details
  • Plumbing analogy
  • Skip sections
  • Focus on sections 6 (The Role of Documentation) through 9 (History of the Future)
  • Explicit issues: key people, communication between humans, defense, fits and starts, adoption patterns…

Between the lines:

  • Where did it happen?
  • Who made decisions?
  • Society shapes technology or technology causes social change?