everything.study
STS.484

The Anthropology of Cybercultures

Graduate · Historical course

Spring 2009

This course explores a range of contemporary scholarship oriented to the study of 'cybercultures,' with a focus on research inspired by ethnographic and more broadly anthropological perspectives. Taking anthropology as a resource for cultural critique, the course will be organized through a set of readings chosen to illustrate central topics concerning the cultural and material practices that comprise digital technologies. We'll examine social histories of automata and automation; the trope of the 'cyber' and its origins in the emergence of cybernetics during the last century; cybergeographies and politics; robots, agents and humanlike machines; bioinformatics and artificial life; online sociality and the cyborg imaginary; ubiquitous and mobile computing; ethnographies of research and development; and geeks, gamers and hacktivists. We'll close by considering the implications for all of these topics of emerging reconceptualizations of sociomaterial relations, informed by feminist science and technology studies.

Readings

  • In this first meeting I’ll offer an overview of the course and we’ll discuss expectations (both mine and yours) for the work that you’ll be asked to do and what you hope to learn. Students are asked to come prepared to speak briefly about their research interests and hopes for the course. We’ll clarify how theory and methods from anthropology and science and technology studies will inform our discussions, and begin to explore the anthropological terrain of the course with a viewing of the documentary Gamer Revolution (2007), Part 1 (45 mins.), Red Apple Entertainment.
    Listed reading
  • Riskin, Jessica. “Eighteenth Century Wetware.” Representations 83 (2003): 97-125.
    Required
  • Fox Keller, Evelyn. “Booting up Baby.” In Riskin, J. Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 334-345. ISBN: 9780226720814.
    Required
  • Channell, David. The Vital Machine . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN: 9780195060409.
    Listed reading
  • Morus, Iwan Rhys. Bodies/Machines . Oxford, England: Berg, 2002. ISBN: 9781859736951.
    Listed reading
  • Riskin, Jessica. “The Defecating Duck, Or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life.” Critical Inquiry 20 (2003): 599-633.
    Listed reading
  • Standage, Tom. The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth Century Chess-Playing Machine . New York, NY: Walker & Co., 2002. ISBN: 9781422360040.
    Listed reading
  • Wood, Gaby. Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life . London, England: Faber and Faber, 2002. ISBN: 9780571214662.
    Listed reading
  • Schaffer, Simon. “Babbage’s Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System.” Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 203-227.
    Required
  • Wise, M. Norton. “The Gender of Automata in Victorian Britain.” pp. 163-195 in Genesis Redux .
    Required
  • Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780674169869.
    Listed reading
  • Cockburn, Cynthia. Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men, and Technical Know-How . Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1990. ISBN: 9781555530464.
    Listed reading
  • Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave . New York, NY: Basic Books, 1985. ISBN: 9780465047321.
    Listed reading
  • Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 . London, England: Thames & Hudson, 1992. ISBN: 9780500274125. See especially chapter 9.
    Listed reading
  • Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison . New York, NY: Vintage, 1995. ISBN: 9780679752554. See especially pp. 135-169, “Docile Bodies”.
    Listed reading
  • Freeman, Carla. High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780822324393.
    Listed reading
  • Grier, David. When Computers Were Human . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780691133829.
    Listed reading
  • Noble, David. Forces of Production . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN: 9780195040463.
    Listed reading
  • Thomas, Robert. What Machines Can’t Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780520087019.
    Listed reading
  • Bowker, Geoffrey. “How to be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-1970.” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 107-127.
    Required
  • Orr, Jackie. Chapter 3 in Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 79-164. ISBN: 9780822336235.
    Required
  • Bateson, Gregory. “Cybernetic Explanation.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780226039053.
    Listed reading
  • Bush, Vannevar. “ As We May Think .” The Atlantic Monthly 176 (1945): 101-108. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Campbell-Kelley, Martin, and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine . Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780813342641.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Ceruzzi, Paul. A History of Modern Computing . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780262532037. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Edwards, Paul. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780262550284. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Eglash, Ron. “ Cultural Cybernetics: the Mutual Construction of People and Machines .” Vienna, Austria: Society for Social Studies of Science, 2000. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780226321462. See especially chapter 4, “Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety”.
    Listed reading
  • Plant, Sadie. “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics.” Body and Society 1 (1995): 45-64.
    Listed reading
  • Rosenbluth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow. “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology.” Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18-24.
    Listed reading
  • Tomas, David. “Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg.” Body and Society 1 (1995): 21-43.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. ISBN: 9780262730099. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Eglash, Ron, and Julian Bleeker. “The Race for Cyberspace: Information Technology in the Black Diaspora.” Science as Culture 10 (2001): 353-374.
    Required
  • Philip, Kavita. “What is a Technological Author? The Pirate Function and Intellectual Property.” Postcolonial Studies 8 (2005): 199-218.
    Required
  • Adams, Paul C., and Barney Warf. “Introduction: Cyberspace and Geographical Space.” Geographical Review 87 (1997): 139-145.
    Listed reading
  • Bleecker, Julian. “Urban Crisis: Past, Present and Virtual.” Socialist Review 24 (1995): 189-221.
    Listed reading
  • Chan, Anita. “Coding Free Software, Coding Free States: Free Software Legislation and the Politics of Code in Peru.” Anthropological Quarterly 77 (2004): 531-545.
    Listed reading
  • Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. Mapping Cyberspace . London, England: Routledge, 2000. ISBN: 9780415198844.
    Listed reading
  • Eglash, Ron. “ When Terabyte Makes Right: Social Power and Computing Power .” San Francisco, CA: American Anthropological Association, 2000. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Fischer, Michael. “Worlding Cyberspace: Toward a Critical Ethnography in Time, Space, and Theory.” In Critical Anthropology Now . Edited by George E. Marcus. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1999, pp. 245-304. ISBN: 9780933452503.
    Listed reading
  • Gajjala, Radhika. “An Interrupted Postcolonial/Feminist Cyberethnography: Complicity and Resistance in the ‘Cyberfield’.” Feminist Media Studies 2 (2002): 177-193.
    Listed reading
  • Helmreich, Stefan. “Flexible Infections: Computer Viruses, Human Bodies, Nation States, Evolutionary Capitalism.” Science, Technology and Human Values 25 (2000): 472-491.
    Listed reading
  • Kumar, Amitava, Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines. “Temporary Access: The Indian H-1B Worker in the United States.” In TechniColor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life . New York, NY: NYU Press, 2001, pp. 76-87. ISBN: 9780814736043.
    Listed reading
  • Nelson, Diane. “Maya Hackers and the Cyberspatialized Nation-State: Modernity, Ethnostalgia, and a Lizard Queen in Guatemala.” Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996): 287-308.
    Listed reading
  • Sundaram, Ravi. “Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India.” In Sarai Reader 01: Public Domain. Delhi, India: Sarai, 2001, pp. 93-99. ( PDF ) ↗
    Listed reading
  • Turing, Alan. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 59 (1950): 433-460.
    Required
  • Adam, Alison. “The Knowing Subject in AI.” Chapter 3 in Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine . New York, NY: Routledge, 1998. ISBN: 9780415129626.
    Required
  • Agre, Philip. Computation and Human Experience . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780521386036.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Breazeal, Cynthia. Designing Sociable Robots . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780262524315. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Button, Graham, Jeff Coulter, John R. Lee, and Wes Sharrock. Computers, Minds and Conduct . Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1995. ISBN: 9780745615714.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Collins, H. M. Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780262531153. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Dreyfus, Hubert. What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780262540674. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Forsythe, Diana, and David J. Hess. Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence, Writing Science . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780804742030.
    Listed reading
  • Halberstam, Judith. “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machines.” Feminist Studies 17 (1991): 439-460.
    Listed reading
  • Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2: A Novel . New York, NY: Picador, 2004. ISBN: 9780312423131.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Suchman, Lucy. “Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies . 3rd ed. Edited by E. Hackett O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch and J. Wajcman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, pp. 139-163. ISBN: 9780262083645. ↗
    Listed reading
  • ———. Human-Machine Reconfigurations . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780521675888. See especially chapters 12 and 13.
    Listed reading
  • Helmreich, Stefan. “‘Life is a Verb’: Inflections of Artificial Life in Cultural Context.” Artificial Life 13 (2007): 189-201.
    Required
  • Fujimura, Joan. “Postgenomic Futures: Translations Across the Machine-Nature Border in Systems Biology.” New Genetics & Society 24 (2005): 195-225.
    Required
  • Doyle, Richard. On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780804727648.
    Listed reading
  • Franklin, Sarah, C. Lury, and J. Stacey. “Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary.” In Global Nature, Global Culture . London, England: Sage, 2000. ISBN: 9780761965992.
    Listed reading
  • Hayles, N. Katherine. “Narratives of Artificial Life.” In FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture . Edited by G. Robertson, et al. London, England: Routledge, 1996, pp. 146-164. ISBN: 9780415070133.
    Listed reading
  • Helmreich, Stefan. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780520208001.
    Listed reading
  • Kember, Sarah. Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life . London, England: Routledge, 2003. ISBN: 9780415240260.
    Listed reading
  • Thacker, Eugene. “Biocomputing: Is the Genome a Computer?” In Biomedia . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004, pp. 87-114. ISBN: 9780816643530.
    Listed reading
  • Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780691135281. Chapter 1, pp. 3-31 and chapter 4, pp. 89-117.
    Required
  • Buy at MIT Press Taylor, T. L. Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Gaming Culture . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009 introduction, pp. 1-19 and chapter 4, pp. 93-124. ISBN: 9780262512626. ↗
    Required
  • Buy at MIT Press Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780262511155. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Bell, David. An Introduction to Cybercultures . London, England: Routledge, 2001. ISBN: 9780415246590.
    Listed reading
  • Cherny, Lynn, and Elizabeth Reba Weise. Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace . Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1996. ISBN: 9781878067739.
    Listed reading
  • Dibbell, Julian. “ A Rape in Cyberspace (Or TINYSOCIETY, and How to Make One) .” Chapter 1 in My Tiny Life . New York, NY: Holt, 1998. ISBN: 9780805036268. ( Village Voice ) ↗
    Listed reading
  • Harcourt, Wendy. Women@Internet: Creating new Cultures in Cyberspace . London, England: Zed Press, 1999. ISBN: 9781856495721.
    Listed reading
  • Hine, Christine. “The Virtual Objects of Ethnography.” Chapter 3 in Virtual Ethnography . London, England: Sage, 2000. ISBN: 9780761958956.
    Listed reading
  • Jones, Steven. Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety . London, England: Sage, 1997. ISBN: 9780761955269.
    Listed reading
  • Kolko, Beth, Gilbert Rodman, and Lisa Nakamura. Race in Cyberspace . London, England: Routledge, 1999. ISBN: 9780415921633.
    Listed reading
  • Mikula, Maja. “Virtual Landscapes of Memory.” Information, Communication & Society 6 (2003): 169-186.
    Listed reading
  • Munt, Sally. Technospaces: Inside the New Media . New York, NY: Continuum, 2001. ISBN: 9780826450036.
    Listed reading
  • Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet . London, England: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 9780415938365.
    Listed reading
  • Nelson, Alondra, Thuy Linh N. Tu, and Alicia Hines. Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life . New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780814736043.
    Listed reading
  • O’Riordan, Kate, and David Phillips. Queer Online: Media Technology & Sexuality . New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2007. ISBN: 9780820486260.
    Listed reading
  • Phillips, David. “Negotiating the Digital Closet: Online Pseudonymity and the Politics of Sexual Identity.” Information, Communication & Society 5 (2002): 406-424.
    Listed reading
  • Shields, Bob. Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies . London, England: Sage, 1996. ISBN: 9780803975194.
    Listed reading
  • Slater, Don. “Social Relationships and Identity, Online and Offline.” In Lievrouw, Leah, and Sonia Livingstone. Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs . London, England: Sage, 2002, pp. 533-546. ISBN: 9780761965107.
    Listed reading
  • Slater, Don. “Making Things Real: Ethics and Order on the Internet.” Theory, Culture & Society 19 (2002): 227-245.
    Listed reading
  • Smith, Mark, and Peter Kollock. Communities in Cyberspace . London, England: Routledge, 1999. ISBN: 9780415191401.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures.” In Benedikt, M. Cyberspace: First Steps . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, pp. 84-118. ISBN: 9780262521772. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Taylor, T. L. Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Gaming Culture . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780262512626. ↗
    Listed reading
  • ———. “Does WoW Change Everything? How a PvP Server, Multinational Playerbase, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause.” Games & Culture 1 (2006): 1-20.
    Listed reading
  • Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen . New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1997. ISBN: 9780684833484.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press ———. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit . 20th anniversary ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780262701112. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Webb, Stephen. “Avatarculture: Narrative, Power and Identity in Virtual World Environments.” Information, Communication & Society 4 (2001): 560-594.
    Listed reading
  • White, Michele. “Visual Pleasure in Textual Places: Gazing in Multi-user Object-oriented Worlds.” Information, Communication & Society 2 (1999): 496-420.
    Listed reading
  • Wilson, Samuel, and Leighton Peterson. “The Anthropology of Online Communities.” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 31 (2002): 449-467.
    Listed reading
  • Sobchack, Vivian. “Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of this Century Alive.” Body and Society 1 (1995): 205-214.
    Required
  • For the second reading, choose from the Supplementary Readings. For books, select a chapter if none is suggested.
    Required
  • Allison, Anne. “Cyborg Violence: Bursting Borders and Bodies with Queer Machines.” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2001): 237-265.
    Listed reading
  • Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780822316862.
    Listed reading
  • Clines, Manfred, and Nathan Kline. “Cyborgs and Space.” Astronautics (September 1960): 26-27 and 74-75.
    Listed reading
  • Davis-Floyd, Robbie, and Joseph Dumit. Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots . London, England: Routledge, 1998. ISBN: 9780415916035.
    Listed reading
  • Downey, Gary, Joe Dumit, and Sarah Williams. “Cyborg Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology 10 (1995): 264-269.
    Listed reading
  • Featherstone, Mike, and Roger Burrows. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment . London, England: Sage, 1995. ISBN: 9780761950844.
    Listed reading
  • Graham, Elaine. “Cyborgs or Goddesses? Becoming Divine in a Cyberfeminist Age.” Information, Communication & Society 2 (1999): 419-438.
    Listed reading
  • Gray, Chris Hables. The Cyborg Handbook . London, England: Routledge, 1995. ISBN: 9780415908498.
    Listed reading
  • Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature . New York, NY: Routledge, 1991. ISBN: 9781853431395.
    Listed reading
  • Hayles, N. Katherine. “The Materiality of Informatics.” Chapter 8 in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780226321462.
    Listed reading
  • Ihde, Don. Bodies in Technology . Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780816638468.
    Listed reading
  • Jain, Sarah. “The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling the Prosthesis Trope.” Science, Technology and Human Values 24 (1999): 31-54.
    Listed reading
  • Kirkup, Gill. The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader . London, England: Routledge, 2000. ISBN: 9780415220910.
    Listed reading
  • Lykke, Nina, and Rosi Braidotti. Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs . London, England: Zed Books, 1996. ISBN: 9781856493826.
    Listed reading
  • Michael, Mike. “These Boots are Made for Walking: Mundane Technology, The Body, and Human-Environment Relations.” Body and Society 6 (2000): 107-126.
    Listed reading
  • Moore, C. L. “No Woman Born.” In Scotia, Thomas, and George Zebrowski. Human-Machines: An Anthology of Stories About Cyborgs . New York, NY: Vintage, 1975, pp. 63-118.
    Listed reading
  • Piercy, Marge. He, She and It . New York, NY: Faucett, 1993. ISBN: 9780449220603.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Stone, Allucquère Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. ISBN: 9780262691895. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Sundén, Jenny. “What Happened to Difference in Cyberspace? The (Re)turn of the She-Cyborg.” Feminist Media Studies 1 (2001): 215-232.
    Listed reading
  • Wright, Melissa. “Desire and the Prosthetics of Supervision: A Case of Maquiladora Flexibility.” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2001): 354-373.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Wiener, Norbert. God and Golem, Inc . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966, pp. 71-95. ISBN: 9780262730112. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Green, Nicola. “On the Move: Technology, Mobility, and the Mediation of Social Time and Space.” The Information Society 18 (2002): 281-292.
    Required
  • Ito, Mimi, Daisuke Okabe, and Ken Anderson. “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places.” In The Reconstruction of Space and Time Through Mobile Communication Practices . Edited by R. Ling and S. Campbell. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2008. ISBN: 9781412808095. ( PDF ) ↗
    Required
  • Barfield, Woodrow, and Thomas Caudell. Fundamentals of Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001. ISBN: 9780805829020.
    Listed reading
  • Brown, B., N. Green, and R. Harper. Wireless World: Social and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age . London, England: Springer-Verlag, 2001. ISBN: 9781852334772.
    Listed reading
  • Bull, Michael. “The World According to Sound: Investigating the World of Walkman Users.” New Media & Society 3 (2001): 179-197.
    Listed reading
  • Humphreys, Lee. “Cellphones in Public: Social Interactions in a Wireless Era.” New Media & Society 7 (2005): 810-833.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Ito, Mimi, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese life . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780262590259. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Mann, Steve, and Hal Niedzviecki. Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer . Doubleday Canada, 2001. ISBN: 9780385658256.
    Listed reading
  • Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. “Mobile Transformations of ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Life.” Theory, Culture & Society 20 (2003): 107-125.
    Listed reading
  • Viseu, Ana. “Simulation and Augmentation: Issues of Wearable Computers.” Ethics and Information Technology 5 (2003): 17-26.
    Listed reading
  • See also the journals Personal and Ubiquitous Computing and Pervasive and Mobile Computing .
    Listed reading
  • Newman, Susan. “Here, There, and Nowhere At All: Distribution, Negotiation, and Virtuality in Postmodern Ethnography and Engineering.” Knowledge and Society 11 (1998): 235-267.
    Required
  • Born, Georgina. “(Im)materiality and Sociality: The Dynamics of Intellectual Property in a Computer Software Research Culture.” Social Anthropology 4 (1996): 101-116.
    Required
  • Buy at MIT Press Bucciarelli, Lawrence. Designing Engineers . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780262522120. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Button, Graham, and Wes Sharrock. “The Organizational Accountability of Technological Work.” Social Studies of Science 28 (1998): 73-102.
    Listed reading
  • Downey, Gary. The Machine in Me . London, England: Routledge, 1998. ISBN: 9780415920223.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “Virtual Webs, Physical Technologies and Hidden Workers.” Technology and Culture 42 (2001): 209-235.
    Listed reading
  • Englebart, Douglas. “ A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect .” San Francisco, CA, 1968. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Hacker, Sally. Pleasure, Power and Technology . London, England: Routledge, 1989. ISBN: 9780044452041
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Henderson, Kathryn. On Line and On Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780262082693. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Kidder, Tracy. The Soul of a New Machine . New York, NY: Little, Brown, 2000. ISBN: 9780316491976.
    Listed reading
  • Kunda, Gideon. Engineering Culture . Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992. ISBN: 9781592135462.
    Listed reading
  • Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or The Love of Technology . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780674043237.
    Listed reading
  • Law, John. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780822328247.
    Listed reading
  • Suchman, Lucy. “Affiliative Objects.” Organization 12 (2005): 379-399.
    Listed reading
  • Suchman, Lucy, Randall Trigg, and Jeanette Blomberg. “Working Artefacts: Ethnomethods of the Prototype.” British Journal of Sociology 53 (2002): 163-179.
    Listed reading
  • Ross, Andrew. “Hacking Away at the Counterculture.” In Technoculture . Edited by C. Penley and A. Ross. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, pp. 107-134. ISBN: 9780816619320.
    Required
  • Kelty, Christopher. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, introduction, pp. 1-23; chapter 2, pp. 64-94. ISBN: 9780822342649.
    Required
  • Atton, Chris. An Alternative Internet: Radical Media, Politics and Creativity . Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780748617708.
    Listed reading
  • Callon, Michel. “The Role of Lay People in the Production and Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge.” Science, Technology & Society 4 (1999): 81-94.
    Listed reading
  • Coleman, Gabriella. “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast.” Anthropological Quarterly 77 (2004): 507-519.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Hess, David, Steve Breyman, Nancy Campbell, and Brian Martin. “Science, Technology, and Social Movements.” In Handbook of Science and Technology Studies . 3rd ed. Edited by Hackett, et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, pp. 473-98. ISBN: 9780262083645. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Kahn, R., and D. Kellner. “Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach.” Cultural Politics 1 (2005): 75-100.
    Listed reading
  • Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet . London, England: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 9780415943222.
    Listed reading
  • Pfaffenberger, B. “The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution was no Revolution.” Anthropological Quarterly 61 (1989): 39-47.
    Listed reading
  • Buy at MIT Press Turkle, Sherry. “Hackers: Loving the Machine for Itself.” In The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780262701112. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780226817422.
    Listed reading
  • Ullman, Ellen. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents . San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2001. ISBN: 9780872863323.
    Listed reading
  • Suchman, Lucy. “Reconfigurations.” In Human-Machine Reconfigurations . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006, chapters 14-15, pp. 259-286. ISBN: 9780521675888.
    Required
  • Myers, Natasha. “Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography.” Social Studies of Science 38 (2008): 163-199.
    Required
  • Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2003): 801-831.
    Listed reading
  • Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780822339175.
    Listed reading
  • Berg, Marc, and Annemarie Mol. Differences in Medicine . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780822321743.
    Listed reading
  • Castañeda, Claudia. “Robotic Skin: The Future of Touch?” In Thinking Through the Skin . Edited by S. Ahmed and J. Stacey. London, England: Routledge, 2001, pp. 223-236. ISBN: 9780415223560.
    Listed reading
  • Franklin, Sarah. “Re-Thinking Nature-Culture.” Anthropological Theory 3 (2003): 65-85.
    Listed reading
  • Haraway, Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience . New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. ISBN: 9780415912457.
    Listed reading
  • Latour, Bruno. “A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans.” Chapter 6, pp. 174-215 in Pandora’s Hope . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780674653368.
    Listed reading
  • Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780822328469.
    Listed reading
  • Mort, Maggie, Dawn Goodwin, Andrew Smith, and Catherine Pope. “Safe Asleep? Human-machine Relations in Medical Practice.” Social Science & Medicine 61 (2005): 2027-2037.
    Listed reading
  • Schull, Natasha. “Digital Gambling: The Coincidence of Desire and Design.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597 (2005): 65-81.
    Listed reading
Sources