Week 7: Cyberspace and hypermedia

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15

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

Martin Campbell-Kelly et al., "The Internet," in Computer: A History of the Information Machine, third edition (2014).
Rebecca MacKinnon, "Networked authoritarianism," in Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012).

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.

First five minutes: Pop quiz? Maybe!
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.

This week you are going to explore some historical news databases.

Pick a term relating to the modern information society — "world wide web" or "computer" or "cell phone" or "digital divide" or ... well, use your imagination. The only constraint is that you can't pick a term that one of your fellow sectionmates has used (so it is in your interest to do this assignment early!)
Try to find the earliest journalistic use of this term in three different historical newspaper databases provided by ProQuest: the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.
Now take the same term and try to find its earliest use in three different scholarly article databases: ProQuest, Project Muse, andJStor.
Write a brief post on your section blog about the ways in which your term was first used, and whether it still has the same meaning today.
Visit another student's post and comment on what they found out about the term that they explored.
You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

Steve Coll, "The Internet: For better or for worse," New York Review of Books (2011-04-07).
Cory Doctorow, "When sysadmins ruled the earth," Baen's Universe (2006).
Greg Downey, “Jumping contexts of space and time,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (April-June 2004).
Paul N. Edwards, "Y2K: Millennial reflections on computers as infrastructure," History and Technology 15 (1998).
Nathan L. Ensmenger, "Making programming masculine" (2008).
Gordon Graham, "The radically new and the merely novel: How transformative is the Internet?" in The Internet: A philosophical inquiry (1999).
Ed Krol, "How the Internet works" in The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog (1992).
Jennifer Light, "When computers were women," Technology and Culture (1999).
Steven Lubar, "Before computers," in Infoculture (1993).
Roy Rosenzweig, "Wizards, bureaucrats, warriors, and hackers: Writing the history of the Internet," American Historical Review(1998).
Lee Sproull, "Computers in US households since 1997" (2000).
Fred Turner, "Where the counterculture met the new economy: The WELL and the origins of virtual community," Technology and Culture (2005).
Alex Wright, "The Web that wasn't," in Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (2007).