Communication Arts 472
Schedule
Section I: A Rhetorical Approach to Technology
9/4: First Day
Lecture: Introduction. Syllabus Review. What is Rhetoric? What is Technology?
9/6: Lecture #1
Lecture/discussion: Rhetorical Technologies
Required Reading: Dewey, John. "Creative Democracy -- The Task Before Us." Progressive Education Booklet No. 14. (Columbus, Ohio: American Education Press, 1939), from an address read by Horace M. Kallen at the dinner in honor of Dewey in New York City on 20 October 1939; reprinted in Vol. 14. The Later Works.
9/11: Lecture #2
Lecture/discussion: The Social Shaping of Technology
Required Reading: McKenzie, Donald, and Judy Wajcman. "Introduction" The Social Shaping of Technology. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999. 3 - 27.
9/13: Lecture #3
Lecture/discussion: Technology is not Neutral
Required Reading: Winner, Langdon. "Do Artifacts Have Politics,?" The Whale and the Reactor. A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 19-39,
Graduate Students/Recommended: Winner, Langdon. "Technologies as Forms of Life" The Whale and the Reactor. A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 3-18..
9 /18: Lecture #4
Lecture/discussion: Humans, Beasts, and The Techné of Signification
Required Reading: Cicero. 1968. Excerpt from Cicero II: De Inventione; De Optimo Genere; Oratorium Topica, H.M. Hubbell, Trans. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 5-6.
Graduate Students/Recommended: Conley, Thomas. Excerpt from Rhetoric in the European Tradition. New York: Longman Press, 1990. 1 -52.
9 /20: Lecture #5
Lecture/discussion: The Copia of Language
Required Reading: Erasmus, Desiderius. "Book One of Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style." The Rhetorical Tradition. Boston: Bedford Books. 1990. 499 - 524
9 /25: Lecture #6
Lecture/discussion: From Tongue to Press
Required Reading: Ong, Walter. "Print, Space, and Closure." Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 1982. pps. 117 - 138..
Graduate Students/Recommended: Ong, Walter. "Writing Restructures Consciousness." Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 1982. pps. 78 - 116.
9 /27: Lecture #7
Lecture/discussion: When Language Is Arbitrary
Required Reading: Sassure, Ferdinand de. "The Nature of the Linguistic Sign"
Graduate Students/Recommended: "Variability and Invariability of the Sign." Course in General Linguistics. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Press, 1983 [1972] and Leví-Strauss, Claude. Excerpt from The Savage Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966 [1962]. pps. 35 - 43.
10 /2: Lecture #8
Lecture/discussion: Architectonic Rhetoric
Required Reading: McKeon, Richard. 1987. “The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts.” Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery. Mark Backman Ed.Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press. 1–24.
Graduate Students/Recommended: Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Critical Theory Since Plato. Orlando, Florida: Harcourtt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1992. 1116 - 1126.10 /4: Lecture #9
Lecture/discussion: Generating Knowing
Required Reading: Zulick, Margaret D. "Generative Rhetoric and Public Argument: A Classical Approach." Argumentation and Advocacy. 33 (Winter 1997). 109-119.
Graduate Students/Recommended: Burke, Kenneth. "Container and Thing Contained." Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969 [1945]. 3 - 20. and Burke, Kenneth. "Terministic Screens." Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1966. 44 - 62.
10 /9: Lecture #10
Postmodern Discourse: Icons and Fragments
Required Reading: McGee, Michael Calvin. "Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture." Western Journal of Speech Communication. 54.3 (September 1990). 274 - 289. and Leff, Michael, and Andrew Sachs. "Words Most Like Things: Iconicity and the Rhetorical Text." Western Journal of Communication. 54 (Summer 1990). 252 - 273.10 /11: Lecture #11 CANCELED
Lecture/discussion: Ethics, Technology, and the Self
Required Reading: Use this time to catchup with reading before the midterm!
Graduate Students/Recommended: Excerpt from Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York; Routledge, 1991. 181. Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York; Routledge, 1991. 149-181.
10 /16: Lecture #12
Lecture/discussion: Postmodern Community: Discourse and Politics
Required Reading: Zarefsky, David. The Roots of American Community, The Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture presented at the annual convention of the Speech Communication Association. Boston: Allyn and Bacon Publishers. 1995.
Graduate Students/Recommended: Asen, Robert. "A Discourse Theory of Citizenship." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 90.2 (May) 2004. 189 - 211.10 /18: TBA [AFS]
10 /23: FIRST IN-CLASS EXAMINATION.
Section II: Network Communication Technologies
10 /25: Lecture #13
Lecture/discussion: The Emergence of the Digital
Required Reading: Ceruzzi, Paul. "Inventing Personal Computing." The Social Shaping of Technology. Philadelphia: Open University Press. 64 - 86.,
Graduate Students/Recommended: Tuck, Mike. "The Real History of the GUI." 8/14/01 <http://www.sitepoint.com/print/real-history-gui>.
LAST DAY TO TURN IN PAPER PROPOSALS FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS.
10/30: Lecture #14
Lecture/discussion: Counter Culture and the Rise of Network Communities
Required Reading: Turner, Fred. 2006. "Virtuality and Community on the WELL" From Counter Culture to CyberCulture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopian ism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.141-174.
Graduate Students/Recommended: Internet Society (ISOC). "A Brief History of the Internet." All About The Internet: History of the Internet. <http://www.isoc.org/Internet/history/brief.shtml> 2004., and Segal, Ben. "A Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN" / CERN IT-PDP-TE. April, 1995 <http://ben.home.cern.ch/ben/TCPHIST.html>.
11/1: Lecture #15
Lecture/discussion: Virtual Communities
Required Reading: Rheingold, Howard. "Introduction." The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (The Electronic Version). 1998. <http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html.> pps. 1 -13.
Graduate Students/Recommended: Putnam, Robert D. "Chapter, 1," "Chapter 13," and "Chapter 15," in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. 15-28, 216-246, and 277-284., and Breslow, Harris. "Civil Society, Political Economy, and the Internet." Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety, Steve G. Jones Ed. London: Sage Publications, 1997. 236 - 257.
11/6: Lecture #16
Lecture/discussion: Writing Criticism
Required Reading: Bring paper proposals to class. [Graduate students should not attend.]
Section III: Case Studies
11/8: Lecture #17
Lecture/discussion: Freedom and Coherence in a Digital Age
Required Reading: Manners guidelines published on LambdaMOO. (lambda.moo.mud.org 8888),
11/13: Lecture #18
Lecture/discussion: Digitizing Rape: The Virtual Effects of Digital Harassment
Required Reading: Dibble, Julian. "A Rape in Cyberspace (Or TINYSOCIETY, and How to Make One) Chapter One of Julian Dibbell's" ©1998. (First published in MyTiny Life, somewhat different form in .) TheVillage Voice. <http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html>.
Graduate Students/Recommended: Dibble, Julian. "My Dinner With Catharine MacKinnon And Other Hazards of Theorizing Virtual Rape." A talk, delivered at "Virtue and Virtuality: A Conference on Gender, Law, and Cyberspace," Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 21, 1996 <http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/mydinner.html>, and Mackinnon, Richard. "Punishing the Persona: Correctional Strategies for the Virtual Offender." Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety, Steve G. Jones Ed. London: Sage Publications, 1997. pps. 206 - 35., and L a R o e, R. J. "Commentary: Virtual Harassment." Internet Informer, Vol. 1, No. 1. <http://www.eff.org/Net_culture/MOO_MUD_IRC/virtual_harrassment.article>.
11/15: TBA [NCA]
11/20: TBA [BONUS]
Thanksgiving Recess
November 22 - 25
11/27: Lecture #19
Lecture/discussion: Media Convergence
Required Reading: Gates, William Henry. 1976. "An Open Letter to Hobbyists." Accessed January 15, 2007, From, http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html and Jones, Mike. 2006. "Official Sites: Movies, Games and the Blurry lines of Genre.." Metro. 148 (1): 160-163.
11/29: Lecture #20
Lecture/discussion: Digital Politics
Required Reading: Sunstein, Cass. "An Analogy and an Ideal." Republic.com. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. pps. 23 - 50.
Graduate Students/Recommended: Katz, Jon. "Birth of a Digital Nation" Wired Magazine. Issue 5.04 | Apr 1997. <http://www.wired.com/wired/5.04/netizen.html> and Katz, Jon. "The Citizen Digital: The first in-depth poll finds, Digital Citizens are optimistic, tolerant, civic-minded, and radically committed to change. And they vote." Hotwired. 1994 <http://hotwired.wired.com/special/citizen/>.12/4: Lecture #21
Lecture/discussion: The Worldwide Web Vernacular: The Case for Pet Cloning
Required Reading: Dillon, Andrew, and Barbara A Gushrowski. "Genres and the Web: Is the personal home page the first uniquely digital genre?" Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology; Jan 15, 2000; 51, 2; ABI/INFORM Globalpg. 202.
Graduate Students/Recommended: Howard, Robert Glenn. "Toward a Theory of the World Wide Web Vernacular: The Case for Pet Cloning" in Journal of Folklore Research. Volume 42, Number 3 (December 2005). 323-360.
12/6: Lecture #22
Lecture/discussion: Digital Empowerment and Participatory Media
Required Reading: Consalvo, Mia. 2003. "Cyber-Slaying Media Fans: Code, Digital Poaching, and Corporate Control of the Internet.." Journal of Communication Inquiry. 27:1 (January): 67-86.
Graduate Students/Recommended: Blood, Rebecca. 2004. "How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community." Communications of the ACM. 47 (12): 53 - 55, Grumet, Andrew. "Deep Thinking about Weblogs." Grumet.net. Retrieved on January 11, 2006, from: http://www.grumet.net/writing/web/deep-thinking-about-weblogs.html, and Herring, Susan C., Lois Ann Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus, and Elijah Wright. 2004. "Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs." Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004. 1-11, and Lessig, Lawrence. 2001. "Controlling the Wired (And Hence the Content Layer)" in Future of Ideas:: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. 177-217.
12 /11: Lecture #23
Lecture/discussion: Stealing for the Good of the Community: MP3, DVD, and Copyright
Required Reading: Vaidhyanathan, Siva. " The Digital Moment: The End of Copyright?" Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press, 2001.149 - 184
Graduate Students/Recommended: Lessig, Lawrence. "Controlling the Wired (and Hence the Content Layering)." The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random House Books, 2002. 177 - 217.12/13: Last Day
Lecture/discussion: Course Review, Discussion, and Evaluations
12 /19; 5:00 PM: Paper emailed to rgh@rghoward.com in .doc, .rtf, or .pdf format.
12 /21; 7:25 PM: COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION.
Location: GRAINGER 1185
These materials are meant for participants in R. Howard's courses only.