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January 10, 2011
Introduction to Communications TechnologiesFor those who might be interested, this entry has been translated into Ukrainian by Aloyna Lompar http://www.fatcow.com/edu/introduction-communications-ua/">here. Well, it is hard for me to believe that the University of Southern California semester starts back today. I think spending 20 years at MIT spoiled me. MIT has this glorious month long "Independent Activity Period", which allows faculty to both catch up on their own research and to test innovative new ideas, host public lectures, and otherwise engage in the intellectual life of the university. It was my favorite time of the academic year and I could use it this year as I have been grinding all break trying to finish up our (Sam Ford, Joshua Green, and my) new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society. I will be saying more about the book here throughout the year, but for the moment, let me just say that our draft is so close to being done that we can taste it! That said, I am also very excited to be teaching my first big lecture hall class since moving to USC. At MIT, my biggest class was 75, while enrollment for this class is over 200 students. I have a great team of TAs to help with the teaching. This class is one which rotates between a range of Annenberg faculty and is intended to introduce undergraduates to basic issues around technology and society. I am using new media in two senses here -- one is focused specifically on digital and mobile technologies, the wave of emerging communication tools and practices that have emerged over the past few decades and the other is focused on the process by which any emerging media technology gets absorbed into the culture. So, there is a constant movement in the class between contemporary and historical developments. For example, the first session we will watch The Honeymooners episode ("To TV or To Not TV") where the two couples go in together and buy a television set. Lynn Spigel introduced me to this episode several decades ago and it remains a staple in my teaching because it shows so many of the conflicts and tensions which surrounded the introduction of television into the home. I will then unpack it for a lecture, drawing on ideas from Raymond Williams and Nancy Baym, about the social construction of technologies. And from there, we will venture into the early history of the web. I am hoping that this constant movement between past and present will off-set a tendency to talk about new media as if they were without precedent and as if their social impacts were inescapable. I've thought a lot going into this class about the issue of laptop use in large lecture hall classes and we've decided to make that issue an explicit part of our strategies for the class. Specifically, we are going to be deploying a Backchannel platform which we have experimented with at the Futures of Entertainment conferences back at MIT. It allows people to post questions and for the audience to vote them up or down so that one gets a rough ranking of their priority for the group as a whole. The questions will be projected onto a second screen in front of the class. This will allow me to respond on the fly to what the audience is thinking and at the same time, ideally, will keep laptop use focused on what's going on in the class. We will see what happens. Anyway, I have made it a habit since moving to USC to post my new syllabi on this blog for anyone who might be interested. So here's the syllabus for my Intro class. You will see that I've worked hard to find the most accessible versions of certain arguments, including the use of interviews, bog posts, and journalistic writing by key thinkers on issues of media change. For those wondering, I will also be teaching my graduate seminar on New Media Literacies this semester. This is the version of the syllabus I posted last year, which still forms the core of what I am doing this term. The key difference is that I will be involving my students in developing and teaching lessons through an afterschool program which Project New Media Literacies will be launching this semester through the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles. I will have more to say about this down the line. Henry Jenkins This course is intended as an introduction to the ways new and emerging communications technologies impact our culture. While the primary focus will be on digital and mobile technologies and practices (contemporary new media), the course will also consider a range of older media when they were new - including print culture, cinema, television, recorded sound, photography, and the telephone. The course is divided into three broad units:
Taken as a whole, this class will introduce students to:
The course readings are intended to introduce core thinkers and debates surrounding these technological and cultural shifts. And student assignments are designed to introduce a range of research methods and conceptual models commonly deployed to examine the interface between new communications technologies and cultural practices. Assignments: 2. Autobiographical essay. Students will draft a short (5 page) essay exploring their own relationship to new communications technologies and practices. There are many valid ways of approaching this assignment. You might describe a particular program you use regularly and how it impacts your day to day activities. You might trace your evolving relations to computers from elementary school to the present. You might describe a specific activity that is important to you and talk about the range of technologies you deploy in the pursuit of these interests. In each case, the paper is going to be evaluated based on the ways you deploy your personal experience to construct an argument about the nature of new communications technologies and practices and their impact on everyday life. The more specific you can be at pointing to uses of these technologies, the better. You do not need to make sweeping arguments about "Today's Society" but you do need to argue how they impacted specific aspects of your own experience. (10 percent) 3. Contextualizing a YouTube video. Each video on YouTube has a story. While it can be hard to trace the origins of some of these videos, each was posted by someone, for some reason. Most reflect ongoing conversations within particular subculture communities. Each may inspire comments either as written texts or response videos. And each may travel from YouTube to other communities through social networking tools. Choose a video and help us to better understand where it came from, how it relates to the existing genres of participation on YouTube, how the YouTube community responded to the video, and how it has been taken up by other online communities. Tell us that story in a five page analytic essay. The core goal of this paper is analysis and documentation, not description. You will be expected to refer to specific outside sources to support your core factual claims. You will be evaluated based on the amount of research performed, on the quality of the analysis you offer, on how you build off concepts from the readings and the lectures to help frame your analysis (including, ideally, direct references to specific readings), and on how well you understanding the nature of the new communications environment. (20 Percent) 4. Reporting on Wikipedia. Identify a Wikipedia entry that has undergone substantial revision. Review the process by which the entry was written and the debates which have surrounded its revision. Write a five-page essay discussing what you learn about the process by which Wikipedia entries are produced and vetted. How does the discussion and debate around the entry draw on the core principles of the Wikipedia community? Again, this paper is intended to combine research and analysis. You will be evaluated based on the amount of research performed, on the quality of the analysis you offer, on how you build off concepts from the readings and the lectures to help frame your analysis (including, ideally, direct references to specific readings), and on how well you understanding the nature of the new communications environment. (20 Percent) Students will be allowed to revise one of the three essays to be considered for a higher grade. The paper must be turned in at least two weeks after the original paper was returned. The grade will only be raised if the revisions substantively address one or more of the criteria for the paper's evaluation. Students who simply correct cosmetic or grammatical errors identified by the grader will not receive a higher score. Assigned Books: Part One: Understanding Technological Change Week 2 January 19 The Origins of Digital Culture Fred Turner, "The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor," From
John Battelle, "The Data Base of Intentions," The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Chris Anderson, "The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet," Wired, August 2010 January 26 From Mass Culture to Participatory Culture Henry Jenkins, "What Happened Before YouTube," in Joshua Green and Jean Burgess, "Andrew Keen vs. David Weinberger," The Wall Street Journal, July 18 2007.
Howard P. Segal, "The Technological Utopians", Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) Bruce Sterling, "Introduction," Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Ace, 1988) Sharon Steel, "Steam Dream," The Boston Phoenix, May 19, 2008.
Debora L. Spar, "The View from Partena," Ruling the Waves: From the Compass to the Internet (New York: Mariner, 2003) Thomas Streeter, "Blue Skies and Strange Bedfellows: The Discourse of Cable Lisa Gitelman, "New Media Users," Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006)
Sven Birkerts, "The Fate of the Book," in Sven Birkerts, Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic, August 2008. Clay Shirky, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," Clay Shirky, March 13, 2009. James J. O'Donnell, "From the Alexandrian Library to The Virtual Library and Beyond" Scott D. N. Cook, "Technological Revolutions and the Guttenberg Myth," in Mark Stefik (ed.) Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). February 16 Television Week 7 William W. Fischer, "The Promise of New Technology" and "An Alternative Sam Carroll, "The Practical Politics of Step-Stealing and Textual Poaching: YouTube, Audio-visual Media and Contemporary Swing Dancers Online," Convergence, 2008, 14, 183-204. Week 8 Misa Matsuda, "Discourses of Keitai in Japan," Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) Part Three: Rethinking... Jeff Howe, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," Wired, June 2006. Brendon I. Koerner, "Geeks in Toyland," Wired, February 2006. Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0," O'Reilly Media, September 30, 2005. Cory Doctorow, "The Branding of Billy Bailey," A Place So Foreign and Eight More Week 10 Jonathon Zitrain, "The Generative Internet," Harvard Law Review 119.7, 2006 March 30 Knowledge Andrew Lih, "Community at Work (The Piranha Effect)," The Wikipedia Revolution (New York: Hyperion, 2009) Week 13 Jeffrey J. Williams, "Culture and Policy: An Interview with Mark Bauerlein," The Minnesota Review, Winter 2005. April 6 Play Week 14 danah boyd, "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Malcolm Gladwell, "Small Change," The New Yorker, October 2, 2010.
Mizuko Ito, "Contributors Vs. Leechers: Fansubbing Ethics and a Hybrid Public Aram Sinnreich, "Something Borrowed, Something Blue," Mashed-Up: Music, April 27 Review for Final Exam
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Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California. Until recently, he served as the co-founder of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More about Henry Jenkins is available here. 
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