Syllabus

 

SECTION 1 – The Relationship Between Technology and Society: Theories, Frameworks, and Evidence
  WEEK 1 – Introduction to the Class
Jan 22nd

[Slides]
Jan. 24th

Further Reading (Optional):

  • Marx, L. (1997) Technology: the Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. Social Research. 64 (3): 965-988.
[Slides]
  WEEK 2 – The User and Society
Jan 29th

  • WEB: Turing Complete User, by Olia Lialina (2012) http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/
  • Fischer, C. (1992). America Calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. (chapters 1, 3, plus read bibliographic essay, take a look at footnotes)
[slides]
Jan 31st

  • Fischer, C. (1992). America Calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. (chapters 6-8)

  Further Reading (Optional):

[Slides]
  WEEK 3 – Theories of Technology and Society
Feb 5th- technological determinism vs. the social construction of technology (SCOT)

  • Heilbroner, R. (1967). Do Machines Make History? Technology and Culture, 8(3), 335-345.
  • Bijker, W. (1995) “King of the Road: The Social Construction of the Safety Bicycle” In W. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  Further Reading (Optional):
[Slides]
Feb 7th- Actor-Network Theory (ANT)

  • Latour, B. (1992). Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology, Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Geiger R. S. and D. Ribes, (2010) The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Savannah, GA.

  Further Reading (Optional):

  • Law, J. (1992). Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systems Practice. 5, 379-393.
  • Callon, M. & Law, J. (1997). After the Individual in Society: Lessons on Collectivity from Science, Technology and Society. Canadian Journal of Sociology. 22, 165-182.
[Slides]
  WEEK 4 – Theories of Technology and Society
Feb 12th – Diffusion of Innovations

  • Rogers, E. (1995). Introduction. In E. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press.
  • Cowan, R. S. (1987). The Consumption Junction: a proposal for research strategies in the sociology of technology. In W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, & T. J. Pinch (Eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (pp. 261-280). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Xiao, Yang and Adamic (2010). “Diffusion Dynamics of Games on Online Social Networks.”
 [slides]
Feb 14th Synthesis and Extension

  • Warschauer, M., & Ames, M. (2010). Can One Laptop Per Child Save the World’s Poor? Journal of International Affairs, 64(1), 33-51.
 [slides]  
SECTION 2 – Technology in Organizations, Work Practice Studies
  WEEK 5 – Methods and Research Design (Evaluating Research)
Feb 18th– Quantitative Research (*Assignment 1 due*)
(Prof. Coye Cheshire to guest lecture)

  • Creswell, J. (2003) Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. (Chapters 1 and 6)
  • Brown M. and R. Muchira. (2004) Investigating the relationship between internet privacy concerns and online purchase behavior. Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, 5(1): 62-70. [*Focus on first 6 pages*]
  • Mark, N. (1998) Birds of a Feather Sing Together. Social Forces, 77(2): 453-485.[*Focus on first 16 pages, up until the Results]

NOTE: The main goal for the second two readings is to critically examine the research problems and questions in each paper, and how the quantitative method fits the stated questions/problem.

Feb 21st– Qualitative Research

  • Becker, H. S. (1996). The Epistemology of Qualitative Research. In R. Jessor, A. Colby, & R. Schweder (Eds.), (pp. 53-71). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Blomberg, J., M. Burrell & G. Guest (2003). An Ethnographic Approach to Design. In J. Jacko (Ed.), The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook (pp. 964-986). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [*focus on pages 965-973*]
[Slides]
  WEEK 6 – work practice studies
Feb 26th – Affordances

[Slides]
Feb 28th – Firms, Production, Collaboration

  • Brynjolfsson E. and L. Hitt (1998) Beyond the Productivity Paradox: Computers are a Catalyst for Bigger Changes. Communications of the ACM, 41(8): 49-55.
  • Rainie, Lee and Barry Wellman (2012) “Networked Work” in Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Suchman, L. (1995) Making Work Visible. Communications of the ACM, 38(9): 56-64.
[Slides]
  WEEK 7 – work practice studies (continued), work roles and professionalization
Mar 5th

  • Sellen and Harper (2001) The Myth of the Paperless Office, chaps. 4, 5, 6, 7

  Further Reading (Optional):

slides
Mar 7th– Work Roles in Non-Office Work Environments

  • Novek, J. (2002). IT, Gender, and Professional Practice: Or, Why an Automated Drug Distribution system was Sent Back to the Manufacturer. Science, Technology & Human Values, 27(3), 379-403.
  • Burrell, J., Brooke, T., & Beckwith, R. (2004). Vineyard Computing: Sensor Networks in Agricultural Production. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 3(1), 38-45.

Further Reading (Optional):

slides
SECTION 3 – Networked Sociability
  WEEK 8
Mar 12th– Synthesis and Extension (*Assignment 2 due*) slides
Mar 14th– New Issues in a Networked Society (*Assignment 2 due*)

  • Rainie, L. and B. Wellman (2012) Chap. 1 – “The New Social Operating System of Networked Individualism” and Chap 2 – “The Social Network Revolution” in Networked: The New Social Operating System. The MIT Press.
  • Boyd, d. (2007) Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
slides
  WEEK 9
Mar 19th– Identity, Community, Reputation, and Deception

  • Donath, J. (1997) Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. In P. Kollock and M. Smith (Eds). Communities in Cyberspace. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  • Ubois, J. (2003) Online Reputation Systems. Pp. 1-18 in Release 1.0: www.edventure.com
  • Bernstein, M. et al (2011) 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Online Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community. In Proceedings of the ICWSM-11. Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblog and Social Media. Barcelona, Spain.

Further Reading (Optional):

slides
Mar 21st – Developing Your Problem and Argument, Part I

  • Becker, Howard (1986) Writing for Social Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (chapters 3 and 8 )
slides
  WEEK 10 – SPRING BREAK
  WEEK 11
April 2nd– Mobility and Dilemmas of Constant Connectivity

  • Ling R. and J. Donner (2009) Mobile Communication. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. (chapters 1 and 5)
  • Humphreys, L. (2005) “Cellphones in Public: social interactions in a wireless era.” New Media and Society. 7(6): 810-833.
  • Chapters 3 “Presentation of Self” and 5 “Renewed Social Interactions” from Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday (2012), by Nicolas Nova et al – (OPTIONAL: for more on the project see: http://t.co/RQAkF0cs plus video http://vimeo.com/48204264)
slides
April 4th – Guest Speaker, Judd Antin (ISchool Alumnus, MIMS + Phd), Facebook
  WEEK 12 – Peer Production and Social Movements
April 9th– Peer Production and the Virtual Commons

  • Kriplean, T., I. Beschastnikh, and D. McDonald. (2008) Articulations of Wikiwork: Uncovering Valued Work in Wikipedia Through Barnstars. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. San Diego, CA.
  • Lampe C. and P. Resnick. (2004) Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing. Vienna, Austria.
  • Haythornthwaite, C. (2009) Crowds and Communities: Light and Heavyweight Models of Peer Production. In Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society.

Further Reading (Optional):

  • Butler et al. (2008). Don’t Look Now but We’ve Created a Bureaucracy: The Nature and Roles of Policies and Rules in Wikipedia. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction: a Publication of the Association for Computing Machinery. 1101-1110.
  • Benkler Y. and H. Nissenbaum (2006) Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue. The Journal of Political Philosophy. 14(4): 394-419.
slides
April 11th – Social Movements

  • Morozov, E. 2011. Net Delusion. London: Allen Lane : Penguin Books., Chapter 1: The Google Doctrine
  • Karpf, David. 2012. The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. (Chapter 1)
 Digital Activism Slides
SECTION 4 – THE GLOBAL VIEW: CULTURE, ETHICS, INEQUALITY
  WEEK 13
April 16th – Overview, Issues of Inequality (*Assignment 3 due*)

  • Hargittai, Eszter. 2008. “The Digital Reproduction of Inequality.” Pp. 936–944 in Social Stratification, edited by David Grusky. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
  • Robinson, Laura. 2009. “A Taste for the Necessary.” Information, Communication & Society 12(4):488–507.

  Further Reading (Optional):

  • Schradie, Jen. 2011. “The digital production gap: The digital divide and Web 2.0 collide.” Poetics 39(2):145–168.
  • Schradie, Jen. 2012. “The Trend of Class, Race, and Ethnicity in Social Media Inequality: Who Still Can’t Afford to Blog?” Information, Communication & Society 15(4).
Slides
April 18th– Scarcity and Poverty, Technology in Global Peripheries

  • Jackson S. et al (2012) Repair Worlds: Maintenance, Repair, and ICT for Development in Rural Namibia. Proceedings of Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Seattle, Washington.
  • Parikh, T. (2005) Using Mobile Phones for Secure, Distributed Document Processing in the Developing World. IEEE Pervasive Computing. Vol 4(2): 74-81.
  • Bederson B. and A. J. Quinn. (2011) Web Workers, Unite! Addressing Challenges of Online Laborers. Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Vancouver, BC.
Slides
  WEEK 14 – culture
April 23rd– the cultural appropriation of technology, the embedding of values in technology

  • Williams. R. (1983) Culture. In Keywords. Flamingo Press: 87-93.
  • Nissenbaum, H. (2001) How Computer Systems Embody Values. IEEE Computer. 34(3): 120, 118-119.
  • Horst, H., & Miller, D. (2006). Link-up. In The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. London: Berg.

Further Reading (Optional):

Slides
April 25th – intercultural communication and design

  • Sun, H. (2012) “Approaching Culture in Cross-Cultural Technology Design” (chapter 1) from Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  • Sun, H. (2009) “The Triumph of Users: Achieving Cultural Usability Goals With User
    Localization” in Technical Communication Quarterly. 15(4): 457-481.
  • Mirchandani, K. (2004) Practices of Global Capital: Gaps, Cracks and Ironies in Transnational Call Centres in India. Global Networks. 4(4): 355-373.

  Further Reading (Optional):

  • Google Tech Talk: A Chinese Typewriter in Silicon Valley, Tom Mullaney
  • Poster, W. (2007). Who’s On the Line? Indian Call Center Agents Pose as Americans for U.S.-Outsourced Firms. Industrial Relations, 46: 271-304.
Slides
  WEEK 15 – COURSE WRAP UP AND REVIEW
April 30th >
May 2nd
  WEEK 16 – RRR Week

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