reading schedule, part 3

Week 9 (7/21 – 7/27)

The Cybercultures Reader, David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds., pp. 159-320

Includes:

• Mapping the Big Girl: Lara Croft and New Media Fandom (Bob Rehak) [Popular Cybercultures]
• From DV Realism to a Universal Recording Machine (Lev Manovich) [Popular Cybercultures]
• Electronic Homesteading on the Rural Frontier: Big Sky Telegraph and its Community (Willard Uncapher) [Cybercommunities]
• Community in the Abstract: A Political and Ethical Dilemma? (Michele Willson) [Cybercommunities]
• Against Virtual Community: For a Politics of Distance (Kevin Robins) [Cybercommunities]
• Virtual Togetherness: An Everyday-Life Perspective (Maria Bakardjieva) [Cybercommunities]
• Webs as Pegs (David Bell) [Cybercommunities]
• Identity Construction and Self-presentation on Personal Homepages: Emancipatory Potentials and Reality Constraints (Charles Cheung) [Cyberidentities]
• Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner (Alison Landsberg) [Cyberidentities]
• Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet (Lisa Nakamura) [Cyberidentities]
• Cyberpublics and Diaspora Politics among Transnational Chinese (Aihwa Ong) [Cyberidentities]

Week 10 (7/28 – 8/3)

The Cybercultures Reader, David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds., pp. 321-471

Includes:

• Promiscuous Fictions (Tyler Curtain) [Cyberidentities]
• On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations (Sadie Plant) [Cyberfeminisms]
• New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed (Chela Sandoval) [Cyberfeminisms]
• Cyberquake: Haraway’s Manifesto (Zoë Sofoulis) [Cyberfeminisms]
• Feminist AI Projects and Cyberfutures (Alison Adam) [Cyberfeminisms]
• The Embodied Computer/User (Deborah Lupton) [Cyberbodies]
• Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures (Allucquere Rosanne Stone) [Cyberbodies]
• From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-Human Entities (Stelarc) [Cyberbodies]

Week 11 (8/4 – 8/10)

The Cybercultures Reader, David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds., pp. 472-637

Includes:

• Serene and Happy and Distant: An Interview with Orlan (Robert Ayers) [Cyberbodies]
• Revenants: Death and the Digital Uncanny (Catherine Waldby) [Cyberbodies]
• The Universal Robot (Hans Moravec) [Cyberlife]
• Cyberlife’s Creatures (Sarah Kember) [Cyberlife]
• Cyborg Babies and Cy-Dough-Plasm: Ideas about Self and Life in the Culture of Simulation (Sherry Turkle) [Cyberlife]
• Computing the Human (N. Katherine Hayles) [Cyberlife]
• Digital Networks and the State: Some Governance Questions (Saskia Sassen) [Cyberpolitics]
• Technopower and its Cyberfutures (Tim Jordan) [Cyberpolitics]
• Hackers—Cyberpunks or Microserfs? (Paul A. Taylor) [Cyberpolitics]
• Technopolitics and Oppositional Media (Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner) [Cyberpolitics]

Week 12 (8/11 – 8/16)

The Cybercultures Reader, David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds., pp. 638-787

Includes:

• The Internet in the Aftermath of the World Trade Center Attack (Briavel Holcomb, Philip B. Bakelaar, and Mark Zizzamia) [Cyberpolitics]
• Flow, Process, Fold (Timothy Lenoir and Casey Alt) [Beyond Cybercultures]
• Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering: Science Fiction as Science (Colin Milburn) [Beyond Cybercultures]
• Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics (Robin Held) [Beyond Cybercultures]
• Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City (Matthew Gandy) [Beyond Cybercultures]
• From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces (Adriana de Souza e Silva) [Beyond Cybercultures]
• Thinking Ontologies of the Mind/Body Relational: Fragile Faces and Fugitive Graces in the Processuality of Creativity and Performativity (Barbara M. Kennedy) [Beyond Cybercultures]

reading schedule, part 2

Week 5 (6/23 – 6/29)

Critical Cyberculture Studies, David Silver and Adrienne Massanari, eds., pp. 205-308

Includes:

• An Action Research (AR) Manifesto for Cyberculture Power to “Marginalized” Cultures of Difference (Bharat Mehra) [Cultural Difference in/and Cyberculture]
• Cyberstudies and the Politics of Visibility (David J. Phillips) [Cultural Difference in/and Cyberculture]
• Disaggregation, Technology, and Masculinity: Elements of Internet Research (Frank Schaap) [Cultural Difference in/and Cyberculture]
• Gender, Technology, and Visual Cyberculture: Virtually Women (Kate O’Riordan) [Cultural Difference in/and Cyberculture]
• How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology: Lessons from the First Hackers’ Conference (Fred Turner) [Critical Histories of the Recent Past]
• Government.com: ICTs and Reforming Governance in Asia (Shanthi Kalathil) [Critical Histories of the Recent Past]
• Dot-Coms and Cyberculture Studies: Amazon.com as a Case Study (Adrienne Massanari) [Critical Histories of the Recent Past]
• Associating Independents: Business Relationships and the Culture of Independence in the Dot-Com Era (Gina Neff) [Critical Histories of the Recent Past]

Week 6 (6/30 – 7/6)

Cyber_Reader, Neil Spiller, ed., pp. 6-157

Includes:

• Introduction (Neil Spiller)
• Of the Analytical Engine (Charles Babbage)
• The Machine Stops (EM Forster)
• As We May Think (Vannevar Bush)
• Essays of Operation (Jay David Bolter)
• Organization of the Message (Norbert Wiener)
• Man-Computer Symbiosis (JCR Licklider)
• Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (Douglas Engelbart)
• The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis (Marshall McLuhan)
• The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics (Gordon Pask)
• Generator Project (Cedric Price)
• The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Paul Virilio)
• A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari)
• Neuromancer (William Gibson)
• A Cyborg Manifesto (Donna Haraway)
• Engines of Abundance (K. Eric Drexler)
• Queen of Angels (Greg Bear)
• The Difference Engine (William Gibson and Bruce Sterling)
• The Origins of Drama and the Future of Fun (Howard Rheingold)
• Policing the Spectrum (Manuel De Landa)
• Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace (Marcos Novak)

Week 7 (7/7 – 7/13)

Cyber_Reader, Neil Spiller, ed., pp. 158-309

Includes:

• An Empirical Theory of the Mind: The Evolution of Consciousness (Daniel C. Dennett)
• Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
• The Strong Claim (Steven Levy)
• Life in a Computer (Roger Lewin)
• Stash Riders (Jeff Noon)
• Techgnosis: Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information (Erik Davis)
• Terminal Resistance/Cyborg Acceptance (Scott Bukatman)
• Feminism for the Incurably Informed (Anne Balsamo)
• Constructions and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality (Sherry Turkle)
• An Open Universe (Kevin Kelly)
• Permutation City (Greg Egan)
• Soft Cities (William Mitchell)
• When I Enter Virtual Reality, What Body Will I Leave Behind? (Karen A. Franck)
• A Natural Model for Architecture/The Nature of the Evolutionary Body (John Frazer)
• Iconographics (Nicholas Negroponte)
• Towards the Post-Human (Stelarc)
• A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (John Perry Barlow)
• Robocopulation: Sex Times Technology Equals the Future (Mark Dery)
• The Senses Have No Future (Hans Moravec)
• The Virtual Reality of the Tea Ceremony (Michael Heim)
• Hertzian Space (Anthony Dunne)
• The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (Margaret Wertheim)
• Vacillating Objects (Neil Spiller)

Week 8 (7/14 – 7/20)

The Cybercultures Reader, David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds., pp. 1-158

Includes:

• Cybercultures Rewriter (David Bell)
• Cyberspace: First Steps (Michael Benedikt) [Approaching Cybercultures]
• A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (Donna Haraway) [Approaching Cybercultures]
• Space for Rent in the Last Suburb (Scott McQuire) [Approaching Cybercultures]
• Cyberspace (Scott Bukatman) [Approaching Cybercultures]
• Red Alert in Cyberspace! (Paul Virilio) [Approaching Cybercultures]
• From Captain America to Wolverine. Cyborgs in Comic Books: Alternative Images of Cybernetic Heroes and Villains (Mark Oehlert) [Popular Cybercultures]
• The Technophilic Body: On Technicity in William Gibson’s Cyborg Culture (David Tomas) [Popular Cybercultures]
• Deai-Kei: Japan’s New Culture of Encounter (Todd Joseph, Miles Holden, and Takako Tsuruki) [Popular Cybercultures]

reading schedule, part 1

For those playing at home, this is the reading schedule I've set forth for the summer. It's pretty text-heavy, so I'll post it in three parts. Parentheses indicate author names, and brackets indicate thematic sections of the book (where applicable).

Week 1 (5/26 – 6/1)

An Introduction to Cybercultures, David Bell, pp. 1-112

Includes:

• Cybercultures: an introduction
• Storying Cyberspace 1: Material and symbolic stories
• Storying Cyberspace 2: Experiential stories
• Cultural Studies in Cyberspace
• Community and Cyberculture

Week 2 (6/2 – 6/8)

An Introduction to Cybercultures, David Bell, pp. 113-207

Includes:

• Identities in Cyberculture
• Bodies in Cyberculture
• Cybersubcultures
• Researching Cybercultures

Week 3 (6/9 – 6/15)

Critical Cyberculture Studies, David Silver and Adrienne Massanari, eds., pp. 1-106

Includes:

• Foreword: Dreams of Fields: Possible Trajectories of Internet Studies (Steve Jones)
• Introduction: Where Is Internet Studies? (David Silver)
• The Historiography of Cyberculture (Jonathan Sterne) [Fielding the Field]
• Cultural Difference, Theory, and Cyberculture Studies: A Case of Mutual Repulsion (Lisa Nakamura) [Fielding the Field]
• How We Became Postdigital: From CyberStudies to Game Studies (Espen Aarseth) [Fielding the Field]
• Internet Studies in Times of Terror (David Silver and Alice Marwick) [Fielding the Field]
• Catching the Waves: Considering Cyberculture, Technoculture, and Electronic Consumption (Wendy Robinson) [Fielding the Field]
• Cyberculture Studies: An Antidisciplinary Approach (version 3.0) (McKenzie Wark) [Fielding the Field]
• Finding the Quality in Qualitative Research (Nancy K. Baym) [Critical Approaches and Methods]
• Web Sphere Analysis and Cybercultural Studies (Kirsten Foot) [Critical Approaches and Methods]
• Connecting the Selves: Computer-Mediated Identification Processes (Heidi J. Figueroa Sarriera) [Critical Approaches and Methods]

Week 4 (6/16 – 6/22)

Critical Cyberculture Studies, David Silver and Adrienne Massanari, eds., pp. 107-204

Includes:

• The Structural Problems of the Internet for Cultural Policy (Christian Sandvig) [Critical Approaches and Methods]
• Cultural Considerations in Internet Policy and Design: A Case Study from Central Asia (Beth E. Kolko) [Critical Approaches and Methods]
• Bridging Cyberlife and Real Life: A Study of Online Communities in Hong Kong (Anthony Fung) [Critical Approaches and Methods]
• Overcoming Institutional Marginalization (Blanca Gordo) [Critical Approaches and Methods]
• The Vertical (Layered) Net: Interrogating the Conditions of Network Connectivity (Greg Elmer) [Critical Approaches and Methods]
• The Construction of Cybersocial Reality (Stine Gotved) [Critical Approaches and Methods]
• E-scaping Boundaries: Bridging Cyberspace and Diaspora Studies through Nethnography (Emily Noelle Ignacio) [Cultural Difference in/and Cyberculture]
• An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Cybercultures (Madhavi Mallapragada) [Cultural Difference in/and Cyberculture]

a statement of purpose

In the typified “here’s my blog, and here’s what it does” introduction, I should start by saying that a seemingly small, though significant part of my purpose is to figure out what the title should be. Astute readers will note that the blog does, in fact, have a title. The title shares the name of one of the primary texts I’ll be reading as part of this project, David Silver and Adrienne Massanari’s Critical Cyberculture Studies. As a descriptive label, that seems fair enough. But in terms of the particular intersection between cybercultures, the “field” of rhetoric & writing, and my own research interests (all sites of vexation in one way or another), I’m not sure (yet) if those three words really hit it.

Aside from titling issues, though, what I should really be doing is discussing the large-scale goals of the project. This is a summer project in which I’m acquainting myself with cybercultures and the academic study of cybercultures. Without even taking the time to sketch a brief history of my myriad uses of technologies, I can safely say that I’ve been enmeshed in the former for a long time. Web surfing, email, online gaming, virtual worlds, message boards, web design, game design, IMing, online social networking, and now blogging (this is my first official foray into blogging) come immediately to mind, and I’m sure there are others. And I’m only describing my material experience with technologies and forms of mediation here, which leaves out all of the attendant cultural implications. As for the latter, I’m basically a newcomer. A n00b, if you will. Thus, I’m undertaking a reading of four major survey texts that will hopefully give me at least a passing understanding of the major issues at stake in how we study and look at cybercultures. These texts are: the Silver and Massanari book mentioned earlier, David Bell’s An Introduction to Cybercultures, Neil Spiller’s Cyber_Reader: Critical Writings for the Digital Era, and the second edition of David Bell and Barbara Kennedy’s The Cybercultures Reader.

As I read, I’m going to be keeping track here of thoughts and questions that I bump into. Fair warning: some of these will be random. However, I also have three texts, three writing outcomes that I plan to end up with, which will be gradually pieced together on this blog. To give a brief synopsis of each:

1. An assemblage of thematic groupings across all the readings. What I mean here is that I’ll end up with lists and brief definitions/annotations of “key” terms, theorists, themes, and so on.

2. A thematically arranged bibliography for further reading. Admittedly, this bibliography will be selfishly framed in terms of what I’m interested in reading next, but I’m hoping that it’ll be of interest to others as well.

3. A reflection on “what this all means” for where I’m headed next. Part of why I’m undertaking this project is to examine if I want to concentrate my doctoral studies on this subject, and if so, how to go about doing that. At stake in this question is the ways in which “critical cyberculture studies” intersects with rhetoric & writing, so this will also be a reflection on larger disciplinary and methodological issues.

So, that’s what I’m aiming for, and we’ll see how it turns out. If you’re keen on jumping in, feel free to do so!