cybertheory
The aspect of cybertheory that I am particularly interested in is the way in which the computer and the internet are replacing the printed book. At a deeper level, I am interested in the way in which the book has shaped the way we are, the way we think, and the way in which we know; and the way in which the computer is changing (and augmenting, enormously) all of that. And that is what I propose the seminar should be about.
A good introduction is in this article:
Kevin Kelly, Scan This Book! New York Times, May 14, 2006 (if you have any trouble getting this, please email me and I'll email it to you).
Please read it, and familiarise yourself (if you don't know about them already) with the following:
wikipedia and the wiki concept ~ blogging ~ podcasting ~ web 2.0 ~ flickr ~ itunes ~ filesharing ~ google book ~ second life ~ digg ~ facebook ~ youtube
Some blogs that we might discuss are:
billygean (by a former student of mine) ~ dooce (now a classic in her genre) ~ lifehacker (a professionally produced (and extremely useful) blog ~ random acts of reality (now a book) and my own blog
You might be thinking of the following memes while you browse:
guarantors of knowledge ~ gossip ~ authorship and authority ~ the kindness of strangers ~ the uses of friction ~ interactivity ~ empowerment ~ trivialisation
and: a wonderful quotation from Douglas Adams:
It used to be that what a writer did was type a bit and then stare out of the window a bit, type a bit, stare out of the window a bit.
Networked computers make these two activities converge, because now the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are the same thing.Further reading:
Vannevar Bush's extraordinary paper 'As we may think', which invented some of the basic principles of the World Wide Web. In 1945. Using microfilm.
Bill Hill, The Magic of Reading. This is a fascinating and very readable account of the problem of how to present readable material on a computer, and a possible solution. You will need to become part of the solution in order to read it, though...
There are two sources for useful links.
This is a very comprehensive and complete list of rich websites entirely devoted to the theme of the seminar: everything you need is here. There is also
which has extensive collections of live links to useful material.
By this I mean the fact that it is very difficult to get information published in paper form, whereas receiving and generating information on the web is extremely easy—in a phrase coined by Bill Gates (or one of his ghost writers) the Web is friction free. The friction of print feels like, and has been taken to be, a guarantee of truth and authority in the book, though in fact what it is is a bug, or technological inadequacy.