Cyberspace and hypermedia

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Journalism & Mass Communication 676 section 114

Prerequisites: None

2111 Vilas Hall
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm (see timetable)
Instructor: Greg Downey <gdowney @ wisc.edu>
Office hours: mornings, 5016 Vilas Hall

Course weblog
You will receive an email inviting you to the course weblog at j676.blogspot.com.  If you choose to join, you will be allowed to post comments to the weblog as the semester progresses.  Ideally, students should also post their "three questions concerning this week's readings" to the weblog as well.  NB: This course weblog is separate from the anonymous, personal weblogs you will each create.

Course email list
To make sure that you receive all emails sent out about the class, check that your current email address is on file with UW by visiting either My UW-Madison (Student Record Tab, Preferred Email address module) or EASI (Extended Access to Student Information).  The address of our class list is: j676-spring2004@lists.students.wisc.edu ; regrettably, students are not allowed to post directly to the list because of spam and virus concerns.

About the course

"Internet research is now a basic part of what it means to be self-reflective about academic work [...] To a degree, we created this medium. It behooves us to study its impact." -- Steven G. Jones, profession of communications, University of Illinois-Chicago, quoted in Scott McLemee, "Internet Studies 1.0: a discipline is born," Chronicle of Higher Education (30 March 2001).

Through primary sources, secondary texts, and on-line experiences, we will explore the historical  and geographical evolution of “cyberspace” and "hypermedia" in the US, beginning in the 19th century with telegraphic and telephone signals, continuing into the 20th century with the development of the computer and the ARPANET, and accelerating today with our existing telephone, TV, radio, library, and mail systems all converging on the World Wide Web. We will pay close attention to how various "new" technologies were understood by users in their original context, how technologies of "virtual space" hide the place-bound material and labor components necessary for their functioning, and how different technologies work to "produce" and "compress" both time and space in a society characterized by uneven (and often arguably unjust) geographic development.

Assignments and grading

Attendance and participation are crucial.  Class will meet for two sessions each week, involving both lecture and discussion.  Students are expected not only to attend class but also to participate in class discussion.  While a small number of class absences are inevitable, you can't get a top grade in this class if you don't attend and speak up regularly.

We do lots and lots of reading in this course.  Enough said.

You will have regular writing and homework assignments.  Sometimes this assignment will be an essay question based on the week's reading; sometimes it will be a "fieldwork" assignment to seek out some information on the Web or write about a class experiment.  The length of these assignments will vary but they are all important and students are expected to take them seriously.

There will be a final research or review project. Each student will be expected to complete a research project or a review project dealing in some way with information technology and equality/equity/justice issues.  Students will be graded on both the written project (due at the end of finals week) and on their in-class presentation of this project.

NB: A research project involves a research question, a thesis, and a series of arguments supporting that thesis, based on evidence from primary and secondary sources on a particular topic.  A review project involves specification of a research area and an analytical summary of and comparison between two or more key secondary sources on a particular topic.  No matter which type of project you choose, your paper should be no less than 10 pages long.

Graduate students have one additional assignment.  This class is open both to upper-level undergraduates and to graduate students, a mix which I believe fosters greater learning on both sides.  However, since graduate students often have specific research interests and program requirements, and because graduate students are expected to be working at a greater level of depth than undergraduates, I ask all graduate students to also prepare a five-page annotated bibliography on some aspect of cyberspace/hypermedia of interest to them.

Grading breakdown.  Students will be graded on overall class participation including attendance, tardiness, and contribution to discussion (33%), on their homework assignments including leading a discussion section (33%), and on the final project including presentation and writeup (33%).     

Late paper policy: You may receive a one-week extension on written assignments, at the discretion of the instructor, but please request the extension before the moment the assignment is due!  Papers which receive extensions will be graded more critically, since students have longer to work on them.  Papers over a week late are generally not accepted.

Rewrite policy: You may rewrite or revise any paper graded a "C" or lower, for a possible regrade (up to a "B" maximum).  Rewrites must be turned in no later than one week after the paper was handed back.

Texts to purchase

University Bookstore

Underground Textbook Exchange

I understand that textbooks are expensive these days, but they are still important to serious study, even of "new media" topics. My policy is to pick class texts that are recent, readable, and useful to students even after class is over.  These texts will be worth your money to buy, and worth your time to read.  

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The new media reader (2003). "This reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs--many of them now almost impossible to find--that chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-emerging field of new media. General introductions by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their historical context and explain their significance. The texts were originally published between World War II--when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared--and the emergence of the World Wide Web--when they entered the mainstream of public life." — from the publisher

Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places (1996). The authors are interested in how telecommunications “impinge on the economic, social, physical, environmental and institutional development of cities.” Calling cities “giant engines of communication,” they point out that the field of urban studies has so far neglected empirical study of telecommunications in cities, instead forecasting either utopias or dystopias. Today, telecom systems themselves are changing with regard to switching methods (mechanical vs. digital), transmission methods (copper to fiber and wireless), terminal equipment (from phones to FAXes and PCs), and regulatory environment (from monopolies to competition). But cities are also going through changes, often linked to telecom systems, including increased globalization, urban competition, and reliance on a new mix of high-skill knowledge jobs coupled with low-skill service jobs. All of this leads to an uneven “landscape” of telecom service and control. .

Dan Schiller, Digital capitalism: Networking the global market system (1999). “Can the Net really foster, as in Bill Gates's phrase, "friction-free capitalism"? How about "robust direct democracy"? In Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Marketing System, Dan Schiller, professor of communications at UC-San Diego, turns a skeptic's eye to the screen. After reviewing how Internet technology differs from previous forms of telecommunication (and how a "Neoliberal" agenda drove its development), Schiller examines its ever-closer ties with commerce and prognostications for educational revolution. His conclusion: "Digital capitalism has strengthened, rather than banished, the ago-old scourges of the market system: inequality and domination."”.

Robert Cailliau and James Gillies, How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web (2000). "Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Marc Andreesen, Tim Berners-Lee (of course), and many more, figure prominently in the interwoven tales, and are briefly summarized in an abridged cast list at the end of the book, along with a paper and electronic bibliography. The book assumes some knowledge and interest on the part of the reader and saves its big-picture context for the end, but provides reader motivation both by its subject's inherent interest and the recurrent personalization of the story. Neither textbook nor CERN propaganda, How the Web Was Born offers an engagingly networked collection of characters that, like their invention, creates something larger than the sum of its parts." --Rob Lightner [Amazon.com]

Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (2002).
"Much of the U.S. media is consolidated in the hands of a few large companies, which results in journalism biased toward the corporate point of view, this book contends. The authors argue for local control, chronicle the rise of grassroots media activism, and conclude with a proposal for meaningful improvement. " — from the publisher.

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984). "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."

Certain optional readings will be noted in the week-by-week syllabus on the right.  You may also download a list of various other readings on the class topic to help you generate project ideas.

Films to watch

Optional films

Films are an important educational resource and should be treated with the same seriousness as lectures and texts, meaning:

• Students need to attend in-class film screenings
• Students should take notes on the films

You may (and should) use concepts, evidence, and arguments from the films in your written assignments

Secrets of Silicon Valley (2001). 60 min.  "SECRETS OF SILICON VALLEY is a shocking exposé of the hidden downsides of the Internet revolution and also a funny and moving meditation on America's love affair with technology. Told without narration, the film chronicles a tumultuous year in the lives of two young activists grappling with rapid social change and the meaning of globalization on their own doorsteps." — from the distributor

Startup.com (2001). 107 min. "Friends since high school, 20-somethings Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman have an idea: a Web site for people to conduct business with municipal governments. This documentary tracks the rise and fall of govWorks.com from May of 1999 to December of 2000, and the trials the business brings to the relationship of these best friends. Kaleil raises the money, Tom's the technical chief. A third partner wants a buy out; girlfriends come and go; Tom's daughter needs attention. And always the need for cash and for improving the site. Venture capital comes in by the millions. Kaleil is on C-SPAN, CNN, and magazine covers. Will the business or the friendship crash first?" — from the distributor

Nerds 2.0.1: A brief history of the Internet (1998) 60 min.  "Join Robert X Cringely in this much-anticipated sequel to Triumph of the Nerds, as he turns his well-informed and irreverent eye on the intriguing history of the Internet. Go deep into the bowels of the Pentagon to witness the birth of the Internet and follow its rapid rise to the cutting edge of the World Wide Web. On his journey, Cringely interviews the unknown nerds who laid the Internet's foundations, visits the Silicon Valley of India and grills the founders of the networking companies who have made millions from this fascinating new technology." — from the distributor

"The cyberspace film festival" (1982-1999). One full hour of clips.  We'll screen classic visions of cyberspace from such memorable blockbusters as Tron (1982), Blade Runner (1982), Hackers (1995), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and The Matrix (1999).

You might also want to try Altered States (1980), Brainstorm (1983), WarGames (1983), Videodrome (1983), The Lawnmower Man (1992), The Net (1995), Virtuosity (1995), Strange Days (1995), Dark City (1998), Existenz (1999),The Cell (2000), and a whole slew of other B-movie cyberspace romps.

Students with special needs

McBurney Center

Persons with disabilities are to be fully included in this course. Please let me know if you need any special accommodations to enable you to fully participate. I will try to maintain confidentiality of the information you share with me. To request academic accomodations, please register with the McBurney Disability Resource Center.

Academic honesty

Misconduct Guide

Academic honesty requires that the course work (drafts, reports, examinations, papers) a student presents to an instructor honestly and accurately indicates the student's own academic efforts. If you are unsure about what qualifies as academic dishonesty, please consult the Academic Misconduct Guide for Students.  Two points in particular to keep in mind:

• copying or paraphrasing material from web pages without proper quotation and citation is plagiarism
  
• copying or paraphrasing material from fellow students is plagiarism

Please remember that any plagiarism may be sufficient grounds for failing a student in the entire course.

Useful links

Needless to say, the claims and views of these organizations and publications are not necessarily our own.

Apologies for any outdated, stale, broken, or hijacked links.

• Alliance for Downtown New York
• American Society for Information Science
• Association of Internet Researchers
• AT&T Labs
• Atlas of Cyberspaces

• BitPipe
• TheBrain
• Center for Digital Democracy
• Tour of the Digital Commons
• Computer Chronicles: From Stone to Silicon
• Computer Museum of America
• Computer Museum History Center
• Dynamic Diagrams
• The Information Age
• Internet Journalism Resources
• Internet Society: History of the Internet
• Ghost Sites
• Joint Venture: The Silicon Valley Network
• Lycos 50
• Mappa Mundi Magazine
• Media History Project
• Mindspace
• National Information Infrastructure
• Netfuture
• New Media Studies .com
• New York City Economic Development Corporation
• New York New Media Association
• Online Books
• Online Journalism Review
• PBS Internet Report
• Internet timeline
• Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies
• Secrets of Silicon Valley
• Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition
• TheStandard.com
• Star Tree Studio
• Transcriptions
• Triumph of the Nerds
• US Government Electronic Commerce Policy
• UC-Berkeley SIMS site on The Information Economy
• Usenet News Archive
• Warriors of the Net
• Web Tracer
• Wired Magazine "Encyclopedia of the New Economy"
• Xerox PARC Information Visualization projects

About the instructor

Greg Downey <gdowney @ wisc.edu> is an assistant professor with a 50 percent appointment in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a 50 percent appointment in the School of Library and Information Studies.  His teaching and research both center on the history and geography of information and communication technology and labor.

Downey joined the UW faculty in 2001. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, an M.A. In liberal studies from Northwestern University, and a joint Ph.D. in history of technology and human geography from the Johns Hopkins University. Before coming to Madison, Downey spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography and the Humanities Institute at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

His industry experience as a computer analyst includes three years at the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago, and three years at Roger Schank’s Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. He has held short-term volunteer positions with both the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago and the Community Information Exchange in Washington D.C.

Downey’s dissertation research followed the story of a particular category of information workers, telegraph messenger boys, through a century of changes in the U.S. telegraph network from 1850 to 1950. His first book, Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850-1950, was published by Routledge in 2002.

He is currently working on a study of the discourse of  the "digital divide" in the US between 1984-2004, and a history and geography of audio/visual text captioning labor and technology worldwide over the 20th century.

Spring 2004 syllabus