STS 3561 - Computing Cultures (Spring 2019)

An introduction to the class. We’ll review course mechanics and get a sense of the puzzles and problems we will tackle.

Here is some information on the 2013 UN Women campaign we discussed in class:

• UN Women - The Autocomplete Truth (YouTube video)
• UN Women press release
• Adweek article by David Griner

Much talk about computing is characterized by rather strong and simple narratives. In this session, we will analyze a number of examples, explore the notion of "cyberbole", and learn some useful analytical tools.

• Woolgar, Steve. “Five Rules of Virtuality.” In Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, edited by Steve Woolgar, 1–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Optional:

Crawford, Kate. Think Again: Big Data. Foreign Policy, May 10, 2013.

What are computers and where do they come from? We’ll look at some of the (surprising) ways in which people have approached the history of computing.

• Light, Jennifer S. "When Computers Were Women." Technology and Culture 40 no. 3 (1999): 455–483.

Optional:

Grier, David Alan. “Human Computers: The First Pioneers of the Information Age.” Endeavour 25, no. 1 (March 1, 2001): 28–32.

Lunenfeld, Peter. The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011, pp. 142-178 (Chapter: Generations).

Graham-Cumming, John, The Greatest Machine That Never Was. TEDxImperialCollege, 2012.

When people talk about computers, they also talk about “the user”. In this session, we’ll have a closer look at this rather strange and mystical figure.

• Wyatt, Sally. “Non-Users Also Matter: The Construction of Users and Non-Users of the Internet.” In: How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology, edited by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, 67–79. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2003.

Optional:

Woolgar, Steve. “Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials.” The Sociological Review 38, no. S1 (May 1, 1990): 58–99.

New technologies are often said to be embedded in, represent, or make up “cultures”. But what does that actually mean? How can we think about cultures of computing? For this class, we will try to answer some of these questions through an ethnography of internet scamming.

• Burrell, Jenna. "Problematic Empowerment: West African Internet Scams as Strategic Misrepresentation." Information Technologies & International Development 4, no. 4 (2008): 15–30.

Optional:

Lysloff, Rene T.A. "Musical Community on the Internet: An On-line Ethnography." Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 2 (2003): 233–263.

Turner, Fred. "Where the Counterculture Met The New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community." Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (2005): 485–512.

What counts as “private” and “public”, and why does it matter? How do people go about drawing the line between the two in practice?

• Nippert-Eng, Christena. “Privacy in the United States: Some Implications for Design.” International Journal of Design 1, no. 2 (2007): 1–10.

Privacy is not just an everyday practical challenge, but also an important political issue. In this session, we’ll review and compare different approaches to conceptualizing privacy.

• Marwick, Alice E., and Danah Boyd. “Networked Privacy: How Teenagers Negotiate Context in Social Media.” New Media & Society 16, no. 7 (November 1, 2014): 1051–67
• “Student Record Privacy Statement: Annual Notification Under FERPA.” Cornell University.

Optional:

Nissenbaum, Helen. “A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online.” Daedalus 140, no. 4 (2011): 32–48.

OPTIONAL:

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” n.d., 3–7.

What to do in view of all this talk about surveillance? We’ll have a look at some of the strategies people have employed to deal with new forms of surveillance.

• Coleman, Gabriella. "Code Is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers." Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 3 (2012): 420–454.

Optional:

Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. “Vernacular Resistance to Data Collection and Analysis: A Political Theory of Obfuscation.” First Monday 16, no. 5 (April 26, 2011).

“The Zuckerberg Files.” The Zuckerberg Files. Accessed December 27, 2014.

We’ll have an in-class debate about a particular controversy. The exact topic will be announced closer to the date.

• Prepare for discussion by doing you own research. What issues have come up on around the topic? Who is concerned about what? Have there been specific cases that can illuminate our understanding of the case?

Data is “the new oil”, people say. But what actually counts as “data”? Is there such a thing as “raw” data?

• Rosenberg, Daniel. “Data Before the Fact.” In Raw Data Is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman, 15–40. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

Collecting information and entering it into a database sounds harmless. But in real life, the way we organize and process data can have profound consequences.

• Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. “The Case of Race Classification and Reclassification under Apartheid.” In Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, 195-225. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
• Noah, Trevor. Born a Crime. Spiegel & Grau: New York 2016, ch. 1 and 2.

Optional:

Law, John. “Seeing Like a Survey.” Cultural Sociology 3, no. 2 (July 6, 2009): 239–56.

In this class, we will go on a walk – an algorithmic walk. Please dress appropriately. We will go rain or shine.

• Instructions in class.

We will debrief the walk and think a bit further about algorithms. How to make sense of these powerful yet inscrutable entities?

• Slavin, Kevin. "How Algorithms Shape Our World." TEDGlobal (2011).

Optional:

Helmreich, Stefan. "Recombination, Rationality, Reductionism and Romantic Reactions: Culture, Computers, and the Genetic Algorithm." Social Studies of Science 28, no. 1 (1998): 39–71.

Seaver, Nick. "Algorithmic Recommendations and Synaptic Functions." Limn no 2 (2016).

Ziewitz, Malte. "Governing Algorithms: Myth, Mess, and Methods." Science, Technology & Human Values 41, no. 1 (2016): 3–16.

Fairness is a big concern when it comes to “big data” applications. Who is responsible for associations and predictions made by statistical tools?

• Sweeney, Latanya. “Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery.” Communications of the ACM 56, no. 5 (May 1, 2013): 44.

Optional:

Ananny, Mike. “The Curious Connection Between Apps for Gay Men and Sex Offenders.” The Atlantic, April 14, 2011.

What happens when you invite people to rate their dishwashers, doctors, lawyers, hotels, haircuts, and ex-boyfriends online?

• David, Shay, and Trevor Pinch. “Six Degrees of Reputation: The Use and Abuse of Online Review and Recommendation Systems.” First Monday 11, no. 3 (2006).

We're going for an in-class design challenge: devise a rating scheme that solves a social problem (without creating too many new ones!).

• No readings. Think about a social problem that might be tackled through some sort of review or rating scheme.

We will conduct a poster session and present selected projects in class.

• No readings.

In the final section, we will attend specifically to materialities. How to think about the "stuff" computing cultures are made off?

• Licoppe, Christian. “Understanding and Reframing the Electronic Consumption Experience: The Interactional Ambiguities of Mediated Coordination.” In Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies, edited by Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedberg, 317–40. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Optional:

Nakamura, Lisa. "Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture." American Quarterly 66 no. 4 (2014): 919–941.

This session is about the invisible work we all depend upon but rarely talk about: IT support, software maintenance, data cleaning.

• Star, Susan Leigh, and Anselm Strauss. “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 8, no. 1–2 (1999): 9–30.

Optional:

Irani, Lilly C., and M. Six Silberman. “Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 611–20. CHI ’13. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2013.

What happens to your iPhone 5 when you buy an iPhone 6? In this session, we will have a look at trash, and how it's travelling around the world with different implications for different people.

• Gabrys, Jennifer. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011, chapter 3, ‘Shipping and Receiving,’ pp. 74-100.

This session is about a set of things we take for granted: the vast network of undersea cables that connects us across continents and cultures.

• Starosielski, Nicole. “Warning: Do Not Dig’: Negotiating the Visibility of Critical Infrastructures.” Journal of Visual Culture 11, no. 1 (April 1, 2012): 38–57.
• Surfacing.in (companion site to Nicole Starosielski's project)

This session is kept open for a guest lecture or a topic of your choice.

• TBD

You’ll read and discuss each other’s feedback on extended abstracts.

• Two assigned extended abstracts from your classmates.

TBD

• TBD

Time to say goodbye and look back at what we learned this semester.