Cybersociality. spring, 2011

Transcription

1 Cybersociality spring, 2011 Tom Boellstorff Professor, Department of Anthropology EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, American Anthropologist Anthropology 250B course code Meets: Tuesdays, noon 2:50pm, SBS 3200 Office Hours: Tuesdays, 10am noon Office: SBS 3322 First Meeting: Tuesday, March 29, noon, SBS 3200 Course Description This is an advanced graduate course meant to explore emerging questions of sociality in cyberspace, and their implications for human life online and offline. To focus the course within the limits of the quarter system, readings and discussion will focus on (1) virtual worlds, online games, and social networking sites; (2) ethnographic approaches, including questions of method; and (3) theorizing indexical relationships between the virtual and actual. With my permission, your course research paper may address other substantive topics (e.g., mobile devices, websites and blogs) and other theoretical interests, so long as the paper engages in a substantial manner with course readings and discussion. The course is meant to be focused on reading and discussion, rather than writing. There is what appears to be a heavy reading load, but I will provide guidance on how to improve your ability to engage productively with large amounts of reading and the amount of writing you must do is reduced it will be okay, I promise! <NOTE: I will not allow any student to take an incomplete for this course under any circumstances.> The seminar discussions will follow three basic guidelines: Generosity. With a ten-week course there simply is not time for substandard texts. All readings selected for the syllabus are insightful and theoretically innovative. Critiquing aspects of the readings is fine, but if you find yourself rejecting an argument in toto, this indicates your reading is insufficiently generous. cybersociality, boellstorff, spring 2011, page 1

2 Provisionality. You are allowed (indeed, encouraged) to think out loud, say something and then take it back, and generally speak in a provisional manner, knowing that those around you will be patient, supportive, and slow to take offense. Community. Some individuals are quite comfortable speaking at length: this is desirable, but I reserve the right to ask persons to wrap up their comments, or to solicit comments from persons who have not yet participated in any particular course meeting. course requirements (1) Seven two-page précises The primary requirement of the course is that you do seven (7) précises. Since we have nine regular meetings (following the Week 1 introductory meeting), this means you can choose two weeks in which you do not have to do a précis. Each précis should take the form of critical questions, commentary and analysis about at least two of the readings for that week. They can link the readings to earlier readings from the course or readings from outside the course, but particularly the latter of these is discouraged due to limits of space. I discourage negative critiques; you should focus on generous engagement, linking the readings to our discussions. Précises must be turned in within the first five (5) minutes of class in TRIPLICATE, with the two pages STAPLED together (not paper-clipped or folded). They can never be turned in late. You must be in attendance in class for any day in which you turn in a précis (someone else can not turn it in for you). If you leave class early on the day you turn in a précis, that précis will not be counted. Each précis counts for 10% of your overall grade, so the seven précises together constitute 70% over the overall grade. Please note that falling even one précis short will thus severely impact your grade. If you do eight or nine précises (that is, the possible one or two in addition to the seven required précises, each additional précis will count as 4% extra credit toward your final grade, for a maximum of 8% extra credit, depending on the grade for those extra précises). (2) The final paper Due to the emphasis on reading and précises, the final paper is relatively short. It should be 4,000 5,000 words long (all inclusive of endnotes and references), and can be on any topic that relates to the course, so long as you obtain my approval. You may also apply the course readings and discussion to your own research projects. The final paper will constitute 30% of the overall grade. The course grade will thus be calculated as follows: Seven (7) précises times ten points per précis = 70 points Final paper = 30 points Total = 100 points cybersociality, boellstorff, spring 2011, page 2

3 You will then be assigned a letter grade as follows: A ; A ; A ; B ; B ; B ; C ; C ; C ; D ; F 64.9 and below. course texts The following ten books (listed in the order we will read them) are available at the bookstore, over the Internet, or on reserve (save for the two that as noted will be provided directly). I will explain how to access the other readings during the first course meeting. o Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century s On-line Pioneers (Walker & Company, 2007; ISBN-10: ). u William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace Books, 2004 [1984]; ISBN-10: ). e Geoff Ryman, Air: Or, Have Not Have (St. Martin s Griffin, 2004; ISBN-10: ). a Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor, A Handbook of Ethnographic Methods for Virtual Worlds (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2012; excerpts will be provided). k T. L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2009 [2006]; ISBN- 10: ). x Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press, 2008; ISBN-10: ). t Celia Pearce, with Artemesia, Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (MIT Press, 2009; ISBN-10: ). n Bonnie Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (University of Michigan Press, 2010; ISBN-10: ). i Ilana Gershon, The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media (Cornell University Press, 2010; ISBN-10: X). q Daniel Miller, Tales from Facebook (Polity Press, 2011). cybersociality, boellstorff, spring 2011, page 3

4 course schedule week 1. introduction week 2. o Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet. u William Gibson, Neuromancer. D Rudolf Mrázek, Let Us Become Radio Mechanics : Technology and National Identity in Late-Colonial Netherlands East Indies. Comparative Studies in Society and History 39(1):3 33, v Kristen Haring, The Freer Men of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance. Technology and Culture 44(4):734 61, A Jan Hadlaw, Saving Time and Annihilating Space: Discourses of Speed in AT&T Advertising, Space and Culture 14: , week 3. e Geoff Ryman, Air. b Nigel Thrift, Different Atmospheres: of Sloterdijk, China, and Site. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(1): , p Tim Ingold, Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(s1):S19 S38, v Tom Boellstorff, Culture of the Cloud. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 2(5):3 9, g William F. Hanks, The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference. In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, Charles Goodwin and Alessandro Duranti, editors. Pp Cambridge University Press, cybersociality, boellstorff, spring 2011, page 4

5 week 4. k T. L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds. K Tom Boellstorff, A Typology of Ethnographic Scales for Virtual Worlds. In Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual. William Sims Bainbridge, editor. Pp London: Springer, f Fred Turner, Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community. Technology and Culture 46(3): , Y Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, The Lessons of Lucasfilm s Habitat. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1(1), 2008 [1991]. week 5. x Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life. t H. Paul Manning, Can the Avatar Speak? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2): , T Tom Boellstorff, Placing the Virtual Body: Avatar, Chora, Cypherg. In Companion to the Anthropology of Bodies/Embodiments. Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Editor. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming summer T Paul Kockelman, Agency: The Relation between Meaning, Power, and Knowledge. Current Anthropology 48(3): , week 6. t Celia Pearce, with Artemesia, Communities of Play. h Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Pp London: Routledge, O Gregory Bateson, A Theory of Play and Fantasy. In his Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Pp New York: Ballantine Books, week 7. n Bonnie Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest. A Susan Leigh Star, The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): , X Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34(3): , cybersociality, boellstorff, spring 2011, page 5

6 week 8. a Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor, A Handbook of Ethnographic Methods for Virtual Worlds (excerpts). S Roman Jakobson, Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb. In his Selected Writings, Volume 2: Word and Language. Pp Amsterdam: Mouton, C Pavel Curtis, Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities. In Culture of the Internet. Sara Kiesler, editor. Pp Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992 [1997 reprint]. G Mimi Ito et al, Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project, week 9. i Ilana Gershon, The Breakup 2.0. J Yasmin B. Kafai, Melissa S. Cook, and Deborah A. Fields, Blacks Deserve Bodies Too! : Design and Discussion About Diversity and Race in a Tween Virtual World. Games and Culture 5(1):43 63, R Peter Galison, The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision. Critical Inquiry 21(1): , week 10. q Daniel Miller, Tales from Facebook. t danah boyd, White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook, B H. Paul Manning, Owning and Belonging: A Semiotic Investigation of the Affective Categories of a Bourgeois Society. Comparative Studies in Society and History 46(2): , TAKE-HOME FINAL due ed to tboellst@uci.edu BY 5pm on Friday, June 10 cybersociality, boellstorff, spring 2011, page 6