Digital Discourse

 

Digital Discourse

 

Dr. Carmel Vaisman

carmell@post.tau.ac.il

Spring semester 2018

Tuesdays, 12:15-15:45

 

1. Course description:

 

This is an introductory level course, engaging some of the key discourses concerning the digital culture we produce and inhabit. Are digital technologies making the world a better place or hindering humanity? Are we shaping technology or is it shaping us? We shall explore these broad questions through specific topics such as: language change between orality, literacy, and iconicity; digital identities between performance and self-branding; personal conversation over multiple public media; cooperation versus incivility in networked publics; private/public boundaries collapse; surveillance culture; participatory culture versus immaterial labor, etc.

 

 

1. Grading

Your grade in the course will be calculated as follows:

Wiki group assignment                   35%

Memes group assignment               35%

Online quizzes                                 30%

 

1. Course requirements

Mandatory Reading and participation. Students are expected to read the mandatory reading before each class and participate in class based on this knowledge. Since each week's class represents two lessons, occasionally there will be two mandatory items for each week.

Midterm wiki group assignment. This assignment implements the material taught in the first 3 lessons. You will join a group of your choice in the Moodle, each group can have a maximum of 10 students and you will create a short collaborative document. The assignment is due on Sunday April 8^th by 1pm. 

Memes group assignment. This assignment implements the material taught in weeks 4-7. You will chose a group on Moodle and together with 10 other students you will interpret and/or create memes. The assignment is due by the last lesson 29 May 2018 at noon.

Online quizzes. For weeks 8-11 you will have in the Moodle a very short quiz on the mandatory reading for that lesson and its connection to previous lessons. You are to complete 3 out of the 4 quizzes before each class. You can do them in advance but no later than the start of their respective lesson - they will be closed by noon.

 

Course Schedule and Readings

Week 1

Language, technology and philosophy: an introduction

Mandatory Reading: Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts have Politics? Daedalus 109: 121-136.

Suggested reading:

Baym, N. K. (2010). Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Polity Press. Chapter 2.

Fisher, D. R. and Wright, L. M. (2001), On Utopias and Dystopias: Toward an Understanding of the Discourse Surrounding the Internet. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 6.

Dusek, V. (2006). Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction, Wiley-Blackwell.

Markham, A. (2003). Metaphors reflecting and shaping the reality of the Internet: Tool, place, way of being. Paper presented at the conference of the International Association of Internet Researchers in Toronto, Canada, October 2003.

Peters, J. (1989). Satan and savior: Mass communication in progressive thought.

Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6: 247-263.

 

van den Boomen, M. (2014). Transcoding the digital: how metaphors matter in new media. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

 

 

Week 2

Language and technology: between orality, literacy, and the visual

Mandatory reading: Soffer, O. & Eshet-Alkalai, Y. (2009). Back to the future: An historical perspective on the pendulum-like changes in literacy. Minds and Machines: Journal for Artificial intelligence, Philosophy and Cognitive Science, 19: 47–59.

 

Suggested reading:

Baron, N. S. (2008). Always On:  Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Barthes, R. (1975). The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill & Wang

 

Boyd, D. (2010). "Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications." In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (ed. Zizi Papacharissi), pp. 39-58.

Deutsher, G. (2005). The Unfolding of Language: An evolutionary tour of mankind's greatest invention. UK: Arrow books.

Dresner, E., & Herring, S. C. (2010). Functions of the non-verbal in CMC: Emoticons and illocutionary force. Communication Theory 20:249-268.

Lankshear, C., and Knobel, M. (2007). Researching new literacies:

Web 2.0 practices and insider perspectives. E-Learning 4(3): 224-240.

 

Lebduska, L. (2014). “Emoji, Emoji, What for Art Thou?" Harlot, Vol. 12.

 

Shortis, T. (2007). 'Gr8 Txtpectations': The Creativity of Text spelling. English Drama Media 8.

Soffer, O. (2010). "Silent Orality": Towards Conceptualization of the Digital Oral Features in CMC and SMS Texts. Communication Theory 20(4): 387-404.

 

Week 3

Cybernetics: Transcendence or Zombification?

 

Mandatory reading: Surowiecki, J. (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books. pp. 6-11 (introduction).

 

Mandatory reading: Lanier, J. (29/5/06).Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. Edge. https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new-online-collectivism

 

 

Suggested reading:

Deuze, M. (2014). Living as a Zombie in Media is the Only Way to Survive.  "After/Lives: What's Next for Humanity?" Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts Vol. 25 (2-3): 279-294.

Levy, P. (2001). Collective Intelligence. In Trend, D. (ed.). Reading Digital Culture. Malden, Mass: Blackwell. pp. 253-258.

Siegel, L. (2008). Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. London: Serpent's Tail Publishing.

Turner, F. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University Of Chicago Press.

 

Papers for Wiki assignment

 

1. Cartes de Visite group: Rudd, A. (2016). Victorians Living in Public: Cartes de Visite as 19th-Century Social Media, Photography and Culture, 9:3, 195-217.
2. Coffeehouses group: Connery, B. (1996). "IMHO: Authority and Egalitarian Rhetoric in the Virtual Coffeehouse." Internet Culture.  Ed. David Porter.  New York: Routledge, pp.  161-179. 
3. Scrapbooks group: Garvey, G. E. (2003). “Scissoring and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth Century Reading, Remaking, and Recirculating” in New Media: 1740-1915 .Lisa Gitelman and Geoff Pingree, eds. MIT PRESS, pp. 207-227.
4. Telegraph group 1: Carey, J. A. (1983). "Technology and ideology: The case of the telegraph." Prospects, an Annual of American Cultural Studies: 303-325.
5. Telegraph group 2: Standage, T. (1998). The Victorian Internet. New York: Walker and Co. Preface, Chapter 7 and 8.
6. Kaleidoscope group: Farman, J. (9 Nov 2015). The Forgotten Kaleidoscope Craze in Victorian England. Atlas Obscura (online magazine).
7. Wikipedia group: Liang, L. (2011). A brief history of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th century. In: Lovink G and Tkacz N (eds). Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp.50–62.

 

 

Week 4

Identity online: from performance to self-branding

 

Mandatory reading: Marwick, A. and boyd, d. (2011). "I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately": Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience. New Media & Society 13(1): 114-133.

 

Suggested reading:

Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday.

 

MacAulay, M. & Moldes, M. D. (2016) Queen don't compute: reading and casting shade on Facebook's real names policy, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33(1)-6-22.

 

Nakamura, L. (2014). Gender and Race Online. In Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing Our Lives, eds. Mark Graham and William H. Dutton. Oxford University Press.

Senft, T. (2012). “Microcelebrity and the Branded Self.” In: Blackwell Companion to New Media Dynamics. Eds. Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. Blackwell. pp 346-354.

Thurlow, C. (2013). Fakebook: Synthetic Media, Pseudo-sociality, and the Rhetorics of Web 2.0. In: Tannen, D. and, Trester, A. M. (Eds.). Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Vaisman, C.L. (2014) Beautiful script, cute spelling and glamorous words: Doing girlhood through language playfulness on Israeli blogs. Language & Communication 34: 69-80.

 

Vaisman, C. L. (2016). Pretty in Pink vs. Pretty in Black: Blogs as Gendered Avatars. Visual Communication 15 (3):293-315.

 

 

Weeks 5-6

Mediatized Conversation: are new media changing the nature and meaning of human communication?

 

Mandatory reading: Gershon, I. (2010). The Break-Up 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Cornell University Press. pp 1-15.

 

Mandatory reading: Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press. pp. 19-35.

 

 

Suggested reading:

Baron, N. (2014). Consequences of Connection: Loneliness, Reading, and Robots. Communication & Social Change 2 (1): 2-28.
 

Hutchby, I. (2001) Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity. Chapter 8.

Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication 6(2) 181–201.

Peyton, T. (2014). Emotion to Action? In: Benski, T. and Fisher, E. (Eds.). Internet and Emotions, New York: Routledge. 113-128.

Tannen, D. (2013). "The medium is the metamessage: Conversational style in social media interaction." Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media. Ed. Tannen, Deborah & Anna Marie Trester. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Zelenkauskaite, A., & Herring, S. C. (2008). Television-mediated conversation: Coherence in Italian iTV SMS chat. Proceedings of the Forty-First Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-41). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.

 

Week 7

From virtual communities to networked publics: ideal and reality

 

Mandatory reading: Turkle S. (1996). “Virtuality and its Discontents: Searching for Community in Cyberspace”, The American Prospect, 21: 50-57.

 

Mandatory reading: Senft, T. (2014). Hating Habermas: On Exhibitionism, Shame & the Life on the Actually Existing Internet.” Either/And: New Theories of Exhibitionism & Display. British Media Museum Books.

 

 

Suggested reading:

Dibbell, J. (1993) "A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society." In Peter Ludlow, ed., High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, 1996. pp. 375-396

Marwick, A. E. and boyd, d. (2014). 'It's just drama’: teen perspectives on conflict and aggression in a networked era, Journal of Youth Studies, 17(9): 1187-1204.

Phillips, W. (29/12/2015). We're The Reason We Can't Have Nice things on the Internet. Quartz.
 

Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. MIT Press.

 

Ronson, J. (2015). So You've Been Publicly Shamed. Riverhead Books. pp. 75-81.

Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior 7(3): 321-326.

 

 

Papers for Meme assignment:

 

1. Collective identity group: Gal, N., Shifman, L. and Kampf, Z. (2015). “It Gets Better”: Internet memes and the construction of collective identity. New Media & Society, Published online January 27, 2015 1461444814568784.
2. Visual rhetoric group: Huntington, H. E. (2016). Pepper Spray Cop and the American Dream: Using Synecdoche and Metaphor to Unlock Internet Memes’ Visual Political Rhetoric, Communication Studies 67(1):77-93.
3. Political commentary group: Milner, M. R. (2013). Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. International Journal of Communication 7: 2357-2390.
4. Identity and visual culture group: Shifman L (2014) The cultural logic of photo-based genres. Journal of Visual Culture 13(3): 340–358.
5. Video conversations group: Kendall, L. (2007). Colin Mochrie vs. Jesus H. Christ: Messages about masculinities and fame in online video conversations. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.
6. Cats 1 (Identity, gender and community group): Miltner, Kate M. (2014). "There’s no place for lulz on LOLCats”: The role of genre, gender, and group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an Internet meme." First Monday 19.8
7. Cats 2 (Language and identity group): Gawne, L. and Vauhgan, J. (2011). I can haz speech play: The construction of language and identity in LOLspeak. Paper presented at the Canberra Langfest 2011, ALS2011: Australian Linguistics Society Annual Conference.

 

 

 

 

Week 8

Social media: participatory culture or free labor?

 

Mandatory reading: Fisher, E. (2012). "How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? Audience Labour on Social Network Sites", tripleC 10(2): 171-183.

 

 

Suggested reading:
Benkler, Y. (2004). Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production. Yale Law Journal 114: 273.

Fuchs, Christian. ‘Dallas Smythe Today: The Audience Commodity, The Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory. Prolegomena to a Digital Labour Theory of Value’. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10, no. 2 (2012): 692-740.

John, N. A. (2013).  Sharing and Web 2.0: The emergence of a keyword. New Media & Society 15(2): 167-182.
 

Parks, M. R. (2010). "Social Network sites as virtual Communities". In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (ed. Zizi Papacharissi), pp. 105-123.

Scholz, T. (ed.) (2013). Digital Labor: the Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge.

Wellman, B. (2001). Physical place and cyber place: The rise of personalized networking. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25:227-252.

 

Week 9

50 shades of privacy and surveillance

 

Mandatory reading: Doyl, W. and Fraser, M. (2010). Facebook, surveillance and power. In: Wittkower, D. E. (Ed.), Facebook and Philosophy, Carus Publishing Company. pp. 215-230.

Suggested reading:

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. The University of Chicago Press. Chapter 2.

Bauman, Z. and Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Polity Press. Chapter 2.

Bennett, C. J. (2011). In Defense of Privacy: The concept and the regime. Surveillance & Society 8(4): 485-96.

Nissenbaum, H. (2011). "A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online," Daedalus 140 (4): 32-48.

 

Week 10
Towards an Algorithmic Culture?

Mandatory reading: Bucher, T. (2012). "Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook." New Media and Society, 14(7): 1164–1180.

Suggested reading:

Cheney-Lippold, J.  (2011). A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control. Theory, Culture & Society Vol. 28(6): 164-181.

 

Deighton, R. (2009). Automated Content Authorship: The ‘Real’ Death of the Author. Journal of Digital Research & Publishing Vol 2: 5-14.

 

Hallinan, B. and Striphas, T. (2014). Recommended for you: The Netflix Prize and the production of algorithmic culture, New Media & Society 1461444814538646, first published online June 23, 2014.

 

Poster, M. (1995). Databases as discourse, or electronic interpellations. In The second media age. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 78-94.

 

Week 11

Addiction versus Disconnection / Course conclusion

Mandatory Reading: Cover, R. (2006). Gaming (Ad)diction: Discourse, Identity, Time and Play in the Production of the Gamer Addiction Myth. The International Journal of Computer Game Research volume 6 issue 1 http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/cover

 

Suggested reading:

Griffiths M. (1998). Internet addiction: Does it really exist? In J. Gackenbach (Ed.), Psychology and the internet: Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal applications (pp. 61–75). New York: Academic Press.

 

Light, B. (2014). Disconnecting with social Networking Sites. Palgrave Macmillan.

Schull, N. D. (2012). Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton University Press.