This week in LIS 201 (week 07)

Week 07: Cyberspace and hypermedia

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14

• Films: The Machine is (Changing) Us (Michael Wesch; 2009) and Revolution in Cairo (Frontline; 2011). 

READINGS TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• Henry Jenkins et al., “Where Web 2.0 went wrong,” Spreadable Media (2013).
• Robert McChesney, “How can the political economy of communication help us understand the Internet?” in Digital Disconnect (2013).

HOMEWORK TO COMPLETE BEFORE DISCUSSION

• If it's your week to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
• If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice!  Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.

DISCUSSION MEETING

• First five minutes: QUIZ on reading terms
• Two student presentations (#9 and #10) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
• Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
• Discuss tasks and strategies for writing assignment #2. (Rough draft due on wiki by start of next week's discussion.)
• Graded paper #1 handed back.
• Graded midterm #1 handed back.

ONLINE OVER THE WEEKEND

This week we'll explore a famous article by scientist, engineer, and wartime government administrator Vannevar Bush on hyperlinked media that many cite as an inspiration for today's World Wide Web.

• Read Bush's 1945 article entitled "As we may think," where he describes his vision of an information infrastructure he called the "Memex."
• Twenty years later, in 1967, Bush wrote a follow up article, "Memex revisited," which recast his ideas in light of the early computer revolution. Read this revised version and think about the differences from the 1945 version.
• About thirty years after this, in 1995, a symposium was held at MIT to consider Bush's Memex ideas fifty years after their original publication. (Remember, this was only a few years after the World Wide Web had appeared on the media stage.) Many of the attendees were well-known pioneers in the area of hypertext research, like Douglas Englebart (inventor of the computer mouse), Ted Nelson (author of the 1970s counterculture computer manifesto "Computer Lib!") and Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the protocols that underlie the World Wide Web itself). Read this description of their reactions to the original Vannevar Bush article.
• Finally, perform a Google search on "Memex" to find an intriguing commentary (news article, scholarly article, blog post, cartoon, video, whatever) on this subject.  ("Intriguing" here could mean that you find it very insightful or that you find it entirely uninformed.)  Then go to your discussion section blog and write a new post reacting to that commentary.  Include a link to the original commentary.  Make sure your commentary is constructive and civil, because the original author may notice and want to reply!
• Read and reply to at least one other student's blog posting.
• You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.