Week 4: The postindustrial service economy

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24

Daniel Bell, "Notes on the post-industrial society (I)," The Public Interest (1967).
Nathan Ensmenger, "The Cosa Nostra of the data processing industry," in The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (2010).
Thomas J. Sugrue, "'The damning mark of false prosperities': The deindustrialization of Detroit," in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996).

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.
Complete your peer reviews of your fellow students' paper #1 drafts, posted as comments on their pages of the discussion section wiki.

First five minutes: Pop quiz? Maybe!
Two student presentations (#5 and #6) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.

This week, you will discover how much information you can find out about yourself online.

First, do a geodemographic marketing analysis on yourself, by searching online for data about the place where you live which someone might ascribe to you. Here are some sites to start with:
http://www.whitepages.com/reverse_phone (enter your phone)
http://factfinder.census.gov/ (enter your zip code)
http://accessdane.co.dane.wi.us/ (enter your address)
Next, do a social networking analysis on yourself, by searching for online data specifically about you on various social networking services that you might use — Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. Make sure you are not logged in to those services in order to see what an outisde visitor would see (you might want to try searching your Facebook identity from a public computer, for example).
Now do a general Google search, first using your name in different combinations ("Greg Downey," "Downey, Greg," "G Downey," etc.), then using your email address, and finally usingyour telephone number.
Can you think of any other sites to search for which might provide either individual or aggregate data to help flesh out your "digital puppet"?
When you are finished searching these sites, create a new post on your discusion section blog describing the person that a geodemographic firm would see when they look for "you". What do you think about this representation of your existence?
Comment on at least one other student's posting for this assignment.
You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

Benjamin Barber, "From soft goods to service," in Jihad vs. McWorld (2001).
Daniel Bell, "Post-industrial society," in The coming of post-industrial society (1973).
Jefferson Cowie, "Introduction" and "The distances in between" inCapital Moves: RCA's 70-year Quest for Cheap Labor (1999).
Nick Dyer-Witheford, "Revolutions," in Cyber-Marx: Cycles and circuits of struggle in high-technology capitalism (1999).
Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, "Cyberspace and the American dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age," The Information Society 12 (1996).
Ronald R. Kline, "Cybernetics, management science, and technology policy: The emergence of 'information technology' as a keyword, 1948-1985," Technology and Culture (2006).
Robert Reich, "The three jobs of the future," in The work of nations: Preparing ourselves for 21st century capitalism (1992).
Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano [chapters 1-3] (1952).