Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

• January 8: Caltech and Its Archives

  • Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990), 54–62.

• January 15: Thinking Critically About Infrastructure

  • Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedelus 190 (1980): 121–136.

• January 22: Electrifying America

  • David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (MIT Press, 1992), ix–xi, 85–137.
  • Explore the Southern California Edison Photographs and Negatives via the Huntington Digital Library.

• January 29: Big Creek and the High Voltage Research Laboratory

  • Donald C. Jackson, Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastman and the Control of Water in the West (University Press of Kansas, 1995), 59–83.
  • Peter Sachs Collopy, “Iterating Infrastructure from High Volts to X-Rays to Nuclear Physics: Early Caltech Science in the Archives,” Caltech Physics Colloquium, January 13, 2022.

• February 5: Gordon Kaufmann at Caltech

  • Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Designing for the Genders: Curricula and Architecture at Scripps College and the California Institute of Technology,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985): 439–461.

• February 12: Hoover Dam and the Technological Sublime

  • David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (MIT Press, 1994), 133–142.
  • Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (Oxford University Press, 1992), 64–78.
  • Joan Didion, “At the Dam,” originally published as “A Piece of Work for Now and Doomsday,” Life, March 13, 1970, 20B.

• February 19: Electric Los Angeles

  • Daniel L. Wuebben, Power Lined: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 87–129.
  • Visit from Prof. Brian Jacobson.

• February 26

  • No class: independent Archives visits

• March 4: Chinatown screening

• March 5: River Futures

  • Vittoria di Palma and Alexander Robinson, “Willful Waters,” Places, May 2018.
  • Visit from Dr. Nick Earhart.

A mediados del siglo XX, la invención y disponibilidad de nuevas drogas psicodélicas, y el creciente discurso cultural en torno a ellas, coincidieron con los de la televisión, las cintas de vídeo y la informática. Las tecnologías psicodélicas y la electrónica crecieron juntas, y quienes usaban o pensaban en una a menudo implicaban a la otra. Cuando Sony y otros fabricantes japoneses desarrollaron nuevos magnetoscopios portátiles a finales de los años sesenta, por ejemplo, surgieron nuevas comunidades de artistas a su alrededor, primero en Estados Unidos y Canadá, y después en Europa, Asia, el norte de África y América Latina. Por primera vez, declararon estos entusiastas, mucha gente podía hacer su propia televisión, rompiendo el oligopolio de la radiodifusión. Al describir las implicaciones psicológicas y sociológicas de esta nueva tecnología, muchos la compararon con las drogas psicodélicas.

The course will be divided into three modules:

1. Art and Science: During the first part of the semester, we will think about the relationships between art, science, technology, and visual culture more generally, studying foundational texts on scientific illustration, the influence of science on modern and contemporary art, technological art, and the architecture of scientific institutions.
2. Curating: The second part of the semester takes an in-depth look at the history of exhibitions, both in the science and visual arts realms, and explores the nature and roles of archives and collections as sources for display. We will pay particular attention to contemporary curatorial theory and practice as it has evolved from the 1960s to the present. There will be site visits to the Benton Museum at Pomona College, where we will see an installation by California Light and Space artist Helen Pashgian; the Huntington Library, where we view a site-specific installation by artist Lita Albuquerque and meet with senior curators working on art and science exhibitions; and the Caltech Archives and Special Collections, where we will explore the records kept by scientific institutions. Other guests will join the conversation to deepen our understanding of discourse and standards in the field.
3. Disciplinary Histories and Student Presentations: During the third part of the semester, we will focus on the histories of visual culture in specific scientific disciplines, as well as art and architecture, often reading case studies from Caltech’s own history. Students will curate, design, and present possible exhibition displays on these topics drawing on the Caltech Archives and other local collections.

Throughout the semester, students will investigate a range of visual practices at Caltech and other scientific institutions according to the specific scientific, artistic, and institutional functions they serve. What kinds of information do scientific images convey, and how do we best look at them in their varying contexts? How do we account for the choices scientists and artists make when they represent their work, and what cultural biases or preferences might their images contain? How do scientific images relate to other images in art, technology, and popular culture?

This course does not require any specific background preparation. For those unfamiliar with the academic study of visual culture, additional reading in James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini, Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 2020) may be useful for context.

Student Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Understand the complex interactions between art, science, technology, and visual culture in the 20th and early 21st centuries, especially as they relate to the California Institute of Technology, other American science institutions, and Southern California.
2. Navigate art and science discourses in the humanities.
3. Reflect on and engage critically with trends and issues in contemporary curatorial practice.
4. Collaborate with project partners.
5. Strengthen research, writing, and presentation skills, communicating in a variety of formats and for diverse audiences.
6. Create compelling exhibitions with an understanding of different spaces and their design, as well as the selection, care, and management of display objects.
7. Know artists, scholars, curators, and design professionals working in the field.

Assignments

1. Exhibition review (500 words) of a local exhibition of your choice which engages with both art and science. Specific guidelines for this review will be posted online and discussed in class. Reviews are due electronically before class on October 24, 2022.
2. Exhibition proposal of a concept, items, didactic text, and layout for a small display on an art/science theme either chosen from a list provided by the course instructors or proposed by the student. Elements of the proposal will include a short introductory text (500 words), a checklist of 15–30 display items, a sample wall text (250 words) and didactic exhibition label (100 words), and space selection and layout/fabrication ideas. You may work independently or collaborate with one or more partners. In addition to handing in proposal materials, each student will present on their proposal during the third portion of the semester. Your presentation will be assessed based on the comprehensiveness and originality of your ideas; their viability in a real-life gallery, museum, or library setting; and your creative communication skills. Specific guidelines for a successful exhibition proposal will be posted online and discussed in class. Proposals are due on your assigned presentation day, between November 7 and December 12.
3. Curatorial essay (15–20 pages, no more than 5000 words) providing historical, cultural, aesthetic, or other scholarly analysis of your proposal exhibition, or, with permission of the instructors, of another topic. Specific guidelines for the creation of a curatorial essay will be posted online and discussed in class. Curatorial essays are due electronically on December 16.

Your grade for the course will be based 20% on the exhibition review, 30% each on the exhibition proposal and curatorial essay, and 20% on your engaged and insightful participation in class.

We’ll discuss readings during every class, so please read everything assigned before the class meeting it’s listed under. Please submit assignments by email to both instructors.

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

• August 29: Introduction

Art and Science

• September 12: Scientific Images

  • James Elkins, The Domain of Images (Cornell University Press, 1999), 3–51.
  • Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1–45.
  • Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 1–40.
  • Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Zone, 2007), 9–53.

• September 19: Science in Art

  • James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini, Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 2020), 339–362.
  • Chiara Ambrosio, “Cubism and the Fourth Dimension,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 41 (2016): 202–221.
  • Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists,” Art Journal 47 (1988): 323–340.
  • Vanja V. Malloy, “From Macrocosm to Microcosm: Examining the Role of Modern Science in American Art,” in Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein, ed. Vanja V. Malloy (Mead Art Museum, Amherst College and MIT Press, 2018), 71–97.

• September 26: The Architecture of Science

  • Sophie Forgan, “The Architecture of Science and the Idea of a University,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20 (1989): 405–434.
  • Robert E. Kohler, “Labscapes: Naturalizing the Lab,” History of Science 40 (2002): 473–501.
  • Thomas F. Gieryn, “Two Faces on Science: Building Identities for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology,” in The Architecture of Science, ed. Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (MIT Press, 1999), 423–455.
  • Thomas F. Gieryn, “Laboratory Design for Post-Fordist Science,” Isis 99 (2008): 796–802.
  • Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio: Dispersing Sites of Production,” in Galison and Thompson, Architecture of Science, 497–540.

• October 3: Art and Technology

  • Fred Turner, “Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative Labor in Cold War America,” Journal of Visual Culture 7 (2008): 5–26.
  • Anne Collins Goodyear, “From Technophilia to Technophobia: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Reception of ‘Art and Technology,’” Leonardo 41, no. 2 (2008): 169–173.
  • Matthew Wisnioski, “Why MIT Institutionalized the Avant-Garde: Negotiating Aesthetic Virtue in the Postwar Defense Institute,” Configurations 21 (2013): 85–116.
  • W. Patrick McCray, “Fallout and Spinoff: Commercializing the Art-Technology Nexus,” in Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s, ed. David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner (University of California Press, 2019), 61–77.

Curating

• October 10: Showing Is Telling: Contemporary Curatorial Practice

  • Guest: Tim Durfee, Principal of Tim Durfee Studio and Professor of Media Design Practices, Art Center College of Design
  • Robert Storr, “Show and Tell,” in What Makes a Great Exhibition? ed. Paula Marincola (Reaktion, 2006), 14–31.
  • Kate Fowle, “Who Cares? Understanding the Role of the Curator Today,” in Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, ed. Steven Rand and Heather Kouris (apexart, 2007).
  • Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 14–16, 22–35.
  • Jens Hofmann and Maria Lind, “To Show or Not to Show,” Mousse Magazine, no. 31 (November 2011).
  • Adrian George, The Curator’s Handbook: Museums, Commercial Galleries, Independent Spaces (Thames and Hudson, 2015), 152–206.

• October 17: Archives and Collections

  • Guest: elin o’Hara slavick, artist and curator
  • Elizabeth Yale, “The History of Archives: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 18 (2015): 332–359.
  • Lorraine Daston, “The Sciences of the Archive,” Osiris 27 (2012): 156–187.
  • Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, no. 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.
  • Jennifer Tucker, “The Historian, the Picture, and the Archive,” Isis 97 (2006): 111–120.
  • George, Curator’s Handbook, 30–48 and 56–87.

• October 24: Exhibiting Art, Exhibiting Science

  • Guest: Dan Lewis, Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science and Technology, Huntington Library
  • Sharon Macdonald, “Exhibitions of Power and Powers of Exhibitions: An Introduction to the Politics of Display,” in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, and Culture, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Routledge, 1998), 1–24.
  • Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 1–56.
  • Tony Bennet, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Fergusson, and Sandy Nairne (Routledge, 1996), 81–112.
  • Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2012), 57–100.

• October 31: From White Cube to Black Box: Contemporary Curatorial Thought

  • Guest: Rebecca McGrew, Senior Curator, Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College
  • Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, Part I,” Artforum, March 1976.
  • Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition, Catalogue (Hatje Cantz, 2002).
  • Carolee Thea, “Okwui Enwezor,” in On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators (Distributed Art Publishers, 2009), 43–53.
  • Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (MIT Press, 2016), 9–49.
  • Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 178–246.
  • Irit Rogoff, “‘Smuggling’: An Embodied Criticality,” August 2006.

Disciplinary Histories and Student Presentations

• November 7: Astronomy and Planetary Science

  • Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, “‘Stars Should Henceforth Register Themselves’: Astrophotography at the Early Lick Observatory,” British Journal for the History of Science 30 (1997): 177–205.
  • Omar W. Nasim, “Handling the Heavens: Things and the Photo-Objects of Astronomy,” in Photo-Objects: On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives in the Humanities and Sciences, ed. Julia Bärnighausen, Costanza Caraffa, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider, and Petra Wodtke (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 2019), 161–175.
  • Elizabeth A. Kessler, “Technology’s Palette: Voyager’s Eyes and the Hyperchromatic Enhancement of Jupiter and Saturn,” Technology and Culture 62 (2021): 1087–1118.
  • Janet Vertesi, “Drawing As: Distinctions and Disambiguation in Digital Images of Mars,” in Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, ed. Catelijne Coopmans, Janet Vertesi, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar (MIT Press, 2014), 15–36.

• November 14: Biology

  • Nick Hopwood, “Copying Pictures, Evidencing Evolution,” Public Domain Review, May 18, 2016.
  • Maura C. Flannery, “Images of the Cell in Twentieth-Century Art and Science,” Leonardo 31 (1998): 195–204.
  • Christopher Kelty and Hannah Landecker, “A Theory of Animation: Cells, L-Systems, and Film,” Grey Room, no. 17 (2004): 31–63.
  • Soraya de Chadarevian, “Models and the Making of Molecular Biology,” in Models: The Third Dimension of Science, ed. Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood (Stanford University Press, 2004), 339–368.

• November 21: Chemistry

  • Christoph Meinel, “Molecules and Croquet Balls,” in de Chadarevian and Hopwood, Models, 242–275.
  • Alberto Cambrosio, Daniel Jacobi, and Peter Keating, “Arguing with Images: Pauling’s Theory of Antibody Formation,” Representations 89, (2005): 94–130.

• November 28: Art and Architecture

  • Stefanos Polyzoides, “Bertram Goodhue and the Architecture of Caltech, 1915 to 1939,” Classicist, no. 15 (2018): 8–19.
  • Zabet Patterson, “From the Gun Controller to the Mandala: The Cybernetic Cinema of John and James Whitney,” Grey Room, no. 36 (2009): 36–57.
  • Stephen Nowlin, “@Caltech: Art, Science and Technology, 1969–1971,” Leonardo 50 (2017): 443–447.
  • Lisa Lynch, “‘Out-liers,’ ‘Insiders,’ and Practical Harvest: Art as Technology Transfer in a Research Environment,” Research in Science and Technology Studies 13 (2002): 239–265.

• December 5: Physics

  • Peter Galison and Alexi Assmus, “Artificial Clouds, Real Particles,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 225–274.
  • David Kaiser, “Stick Figure Realism: Conventions, Reification, and the Persistence of Feynman Diagrams, 1948–1964,” Representations 70 (2000): 49–86.
  • James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980–2000 (Stanford University Press, 2008), 156–223.
  • Colleen O’Reilly, “Pedagogical Interventions: The Physics Photographs of Berenice Abbott,” RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 41, no. 2 (2016): 77–90.

• December 12: Conclusion

Our current association of the digital with progress can distract us from the historical fact that the most sophisticated electronic technologies have often been analog ones, processing information as continuous variations in voltage or current and recording it as continuous variations in magnetic fields. The discourse of the digital can also obscure continuities between electronic media, preventing us from seeing how much analog and digital modes of representing information have in common. Rather than thinking of the recent decline of film as a process of digitization, we might just as productively see it as a culmination of the rise of electronic photography, a phenomenon that has introduced into our visual experience not only the digital but also the analog.

The course will meet on Tuesday evenings, 6:00 to 9:00, from September 2 to December 9 in Williams Hall room 219. It will be a discussion-based seminar, though I will punctuate it with occasional presentations. I will be available for office hours before class on Tuesdays from 5:00 to 6:00 in Claudia Cohen Hall room 332, and encourage you to come by and talk.

Assignments

As a seminar, this course is primarily based on learning by discussing the required readings (listed below), so it’s essential that you read and think about them before each class meeting. Your engaged and insightful participation in discussions will account for 25% of your grade for the course.

The other assignments consist of three short papers, of approximately five pages each. I’ll provide more detailed prompts, but in short the first paper should present an argument about whether and how a particular technology “has politics,” the second should describe and analyze your observation of people using technology, and the third should present a brief history of a technology of your choice. You will have an opportunity to submit a draft, get my feedback, and revise your paper before I grade it. Each paper will account for 25% of your grade for the course.

Reading

The following four books, which we’ll be reading cover-to-cover or nearly so, are available for sale at the Penn Book Center and for borrowing at Van Pelt Library’s Rosengarten Reserve Room. Medieval Technology and Social Change is also available online, and other readings will be available through links below.

• Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962).
• Thomas J. Misa, Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present, second edition (2011, revised from 2004 original).
• Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1983).
• David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (2007).

Schedule

• September 2: Introduction

• September 9: Technologies of Feudalism

  • Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (1980).
  • White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, preface and chapters 1 and 2.
  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, preface and chapter 1.

• September 16: Roots of Capitalism

  • Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934), objectives and chapter 1.
  • Cynthia Cockburn, Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men, and Technical Know-How (1985), introduction and chapter 1.
  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 2.

• September 23: Print Culture

  • Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), chapters 1, 16, and 18.
  • Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, second edition (2005, abridged from The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 1979), introduction and chapters 2 and 3.
  • Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, second edition (1986, revised from 1979 original), pages 43–53.
  • Draft due on the politics of a technology.

• September 30: The Industrialization of Manufacturing

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 3.
  • Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (1995), introduction and chapters 2 and 3.
  • Judith A. McGaw, “Gender and Papermaking” (1998, abridged from Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801–1885, 1987).

• October 7: The Industrialization of Time and Space

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 4.
  • Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (1986), chapters 1–6.
  • Paper due on the politics of a technology.

• October 14: The Industrialization of Housework

  • Cowan, More Work for Mother, chapters 1–5.

• October 21: Technological Systems

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 5.
  • Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870–1970 (1989), introduction and chapter 5.
  • Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept” (2010, revised from 1997 original).
  • Draft due on observing technology in use.

• October 28: Modern Cities

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 6.
  • David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (1990), preface and chapters 2 and 3.

• November 4: Modern Media

  • Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999, translated from 1986 German original), pages 1–37.
  • Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (1987), introduction and chapter 6.
  • Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (1992), chapters 2 and 3.
  • Paper due on observing technology in use.

• November 11: Alternative Modernities

  • Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, introduction and chapters 1, 2, and 5.
  • Paul R. Josephson, Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917–1989 (2010), introduction and chapter 1.

• November 18: The Industrialization of Violence

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 7.
  • Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, chapters 6 and 7.
  • Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996), pages 1–27.

• November 25: No class

  • Draft due on the history of a technology.

• December 2: Globalization

  • Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, chapters 3, 4, 8 and conclusion.
  • Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology, second edition (2007, revised from 1994 original), chapter 13.
  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapter 8.

• December 9: Technological Systems Revisited

  • Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, chapters 9 and 10.
  • Nathan Ensmenger, “The Digital Construction of Technology: Rethinking the History of Computers in Society” (2012).
  • Paolo Pedercini, “Videogames and the Spirit of Capitalism” (2014).
  • Paper due on the history of a technology.

• • •

Although it has a longer history, topic modeling is now typically done using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a hierarchical Bayesian model developed by computer scientist David Blei and his colleagues (initial article, technical description, less technical description). The premise, it’s worth stating explicitly, is a rather odd model of composition. “Documents are mixtures of topics,” explains one article, “where a topic is a probability distribution over words. A topic model is a generative model for documents: it specifies a simple probabilistic procedure by which documents can be generated. To make a new document, one chooses a distribution over topics. Then, for each word in that document, one chooses a topic at random according to this distribution, and draws a word from that topic. Standard statistical techniques can be used to invert this process, inferring the set of topics that were responsible for generating a collection of documents.” So topic modeling involves reverse engineering the creation of a text, which is conceptualized as a process of synthesizing multiple topics into a single document. As far as the computer can understand them, though, these “topics” are simply sets of words with associated frequencies. Because topics can be conceptualized as vectors, it is also relatively easy to measure correlations between words or correlations between topics.

Among digital humanists, the most widely used tool for topic modeling is MALLET (tutorial), “a Java-based package for statistical natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text.” There are several alternatives, though, including libraries for C, Java, Python, Matlab, and R (topicmodels, lda) as well as two Java applications: Topic Modeling Tool provides a graphical interface for MALLET (tutorial), while the Stanford Modeling Toolbox is scriptable using Scala and processes CSV files. The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities has produced some additional utilities for MALLET. Perhaps the easiest tool available is the Zotero extension Paper Machines, which incorporates MALLET. Paper Machines can model not only Zotero collections, but also JSTOR Data for Research CSV files, which otherwise requires some preprocessing to be legible to MALLET. Its output doesn’t seem very versatile, though.

There are several precedents for tracking the rise and fall of topics over time, though few seem to have contributed to peer-reviewed historical articles. A project by historian Robert Nelson on the Richmond Daily Dispatch from 1860 to 1865, conducted using MALLET, produced a widely-cited web presentation, and computer scientist David Newman and historian Sharon Block conducted a similar study of the Pennsylvania Gazette from 1728 to 1800. (Block and Newman also published a historical article on trends in the field of women’s history from 1985 to 2005 for which they used topic modeling to compare the prominence of research topics, but its diachronic analysis is all based on text-mining.) Historian Cameron Belvins has diachronically topic modeled Martha Ballard’s diary. Among several studies of academic journals by computer scientists, David Mimno’s work on the field of classics stands out for its careful methodology.

Perhaps the best model for using topic modeling in historical research is literature scholar Allen Riddell’s apparently unpublished paper on the history of German Studies, which contains a particularly clear technical explanation as well as a study of the rise and fall of topics ranging from gender to Goethe. Similarly, but in published articles, folklorist John Laudun and literature scholar Jonathan Goodwin used topic modeling to illuminate the dynamics of folklore studies’ turn toward performance, while Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood not only modeled the topics of the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, but also produced network visualizations of the relationships between the topics.

It is also possible to produce models in which topics themselves evolve over time, changing their word composition. As a demonstration of dynamic topic models, Blei and fellow computer scientist John Lafferty produced a browsable year-by-year model of Science. Blei has also published, with computer scientist Sean M. Gerrish, a study attempting to use such models to measure the influence of scientific publications without resort to citations or other conventional bibliometric tools. Similarly, computer scientists Xuerui Wang and Andrew McCallum (the latter the initial developer of MALLET) developed a model called Topics over Time, which they tested on Presidential State of the Union Addresses and proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems conference. Very few humanists—possibly only Laudun and Goodwin—have used these tools.

On Tuesday, MIT released its review panel’s report on “MIT and the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz.” Those of us interested in the case have been anticipating this report, particularly given the respect many of us have for computer scientist Hal Abelson, who was charged by MIT’s president with writing it. Personally, I learned how to program when I was about ten from a book by Abelson and his daughter, and still appreciate his approach to computer science pedagogy and work with foundations like Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation.

The Abelson report effectively depicts an MIT administration telling itself it was neutral in the case while cooperating with the prosecution, particularly by allowing prosecutors to repeatedly meet with witnesses without an MIT lawyer present once MIT had granted them initial permission, a courtesy they did not extend to the defense. It depicts an MIT that didn’t see itself as Aaron’s victim, but also never recognized its own role as legislator given the use of the MITNet Rules of Use to support a claim, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, that Aaron exceeded authorized access to MIT’s network. Within MIT, only incoming Media Lab director Joi Ito suggested that MIT question the premise of the prosecution, writing to MIT’s lawyers that “since it is a criminal case and the prosecutor needs to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was unauthorized, I think MIT is in the position to ‘cast doubt’ if it desires.” As defense attorneys asked MIT to speak out against the prosecution with increasing urgency, the Institute’s main reason for not doing so seems to have been that they believed it might actually hurt Aaron’s case, that they believed—as Aaron’s friend Lawrence Lessig wrote immediately after Aaron’s death—that prosecutor Stephen Heymann was a bully who interpreted opposition as a personal attack on his authority and responded by escalating.

The report is nonetheless a disappointment. I don’t think I saw until now MIT President L. Rafael Reif’s formal letter to Abelson requesting the report, and I certainly hadn’t realized that Abelson’s charge was limited to fact-finding and “identify[ing] the issues that warrant further analysis in order to learn from these events.” Since Abelson and his colleagues on the review panel, economist Peter Diamond and lawyer Andrew Grosso, didn’t discover any shocking malfeasance on the part of MIT, their recommendations (which take the form of questions to avoid exceeding their charge) are rather mundane, including reforming MIT’s data retention policies and holding “a series of campus-wide deliberations around issues raised by this report.” The most critical, perhaps, is that MIT “develop additional on-campus expertise for handling potential computer crime incidents” in order to avoid reliance on outside police, reliance that in Aaron’s case inadvertently (from MIT’s perspective) involved the Secret Service.

This limited charge proscribed the review panel from asserting outright that MIT should have behaved differently. The two quotations from their interviews which they include in their conclusion, though, say a lot. One administrator told the review panel, “MIT didn’t do anything wrong, but we didn’t do ourselves proud.” And a friend of Aaron’s pointed out that “neutrality on these cases is an incoherent stance. It’s not the right choice for a tough leader or a moral leader.”

Early this summer, I taught a course on the history and culture of the internet. In our discussion of Lessig’s book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, I suggested to students that it, like most political writing, was written in the genre of advice for those in power. Its central point is that “cyberspace requires choices” in how it is built, both by programmers and by legislators. Lessig’s message to these influential people was that although their decisions might seem merely technical, they are in fact deeply ethical. Although he was quite pessimistic that those in power would rise to the occasion—“we urgently need to make fundamental choices about values,” wrote Lessig, “but… the government we have now is a failure”—he wrote a book about how governance on the internet ought to function in America.

I also showed my class Aaron’s 2012 Freedom to Connect keynote speech, “How We Stopped SOPA,” and noted a difference in perspective between these two political documents. Aaron’s intended audience was those who are not in power. His message was that they too should seek to influence internet policy, and indeed that this is the way out of Lessig’s trap. “We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story,” concluded Aaron. “Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it. They did whatever they could think of to do. They didn’t stop to ask anyone for permission.… The internet really is out of control.”

Internet censorship was an issue on which Swartz and Lessig generally agreed, but their rhetoric appealed to different audiences: to caricature a bit, Lessig’s was technocratic while Swartz’s was rabble-rousing. The lesson I suggested to my students was not that Aaron’s perspective was more productive than Lessig’s; I love Lessig’s critical edge, and since I teach at the University of Pennsylvania, I expect that some of my students will become influential politicians and programmers who may build the internet more humanely under Lessig’s influence. Rather, I suggested that, in considering any political issue, it’s worth thinking through both perspectives. What could you do to improve the world in a particular way if you were in a position of authority? What could you do if you were not? We need to be able to think in both ways because most of us move back and forth between these situations over the course of our lives and even over the course of our days. I, for example, have no more influence than my neighbors in electoral politics, but make hiring and firing decisions as a board member of our local food co-op. In either context, though, I want to act ethically.

Because they were not in the role of either prosecutor or defendant, and because Aaron was not formally affiliated with the Institute, MIT’s lawyers and administrators imagined themselves to be neutral, without any ethical interest in the prosecution. The Abelson report reveals that they acted properly, for the most part, with regard to their professional and legal responsibilities. Their largest sins of commission were relatively minor, permitting the prosecutors greater access to witnesses than the defense team and acting on a subpoena which had apparently expired. It also reveals, though, that they failed—“reprehensibly,” as Aaron’s partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman writes, “more than negligent[ly],” as Lessig writes—to act on their deeper ethical responsibilities, in particular by not asserting that Aaron hadn’t actually violated their Rules of Use. In short, MIT believed that as long as they played their narrow role in the drama everything would turn out fine; they did not “take it as their job,” as Aaron would have counseled, to consider whether the prosecutor was behaving ethically and how they could influence him. Given that the case concerned not only the use of MIT property, and not only issues of intellectual and practical interest to many MIT students and faculty, but the eminent possibility of a ruined life, this was a grave ethical failure.

The course will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00 to 4:10, from May 21 to June 27 in Claudia Cohen Hall room 392. It will be a discussion-based seminar, though I will punctuate it with occasional presentations. I will be available for office hours before class on Thursdays from 12:00 to 1:00 in Claudia Cohen Hall room 332, and encourage you to come by and talk.

Assignments

As a seminar, this course is primarily based on learning by discussing the required readings (listed below), so it’s essential that you read and think about them before each class meeting.

The main component of this course other than discussions is a final project, which will involve developing your own analysis of an online community or phenomenon incorporating some ways of looking at the internet from the course. Such a project could take the form of a traditional research paper of 10–15 pages or an online presentation involving a similar amount of research and analysis; possibilities range from videos and webcomics to Twitter or Tumblr experiments and beyond. Although you are not required to make your project publicly available online, I can suggest from my own experience that it can be more exciting to produce for an audience beyond your instructor and would be happy to talk with you about appropriate online venues for sharing your project.

In order to help you progress toward completing your project over the course of the semester, I will ask that you meet with me to discuss your ideas for your project on May 28 or 30, submit a short (one to three page) proposal by June 6, present a progress report to the class June 11 or 13, submit a draft to me by June 20, and submit the final project on June 27, the last day of class. I will provide feedback at each of these stages. Your grade for the course will be based 20% on your proposal, 20% on your presentation, 30% on your final project, and 30% on your engaged and insightful participation in discussions.

News

One of the things we’ll do in this course is use recent history to find ways to think about current events. Accordingly, you may find it interesting or useful for your project to follow some news. The Atlantic’s technology channel is among the best sources. Wired has many sections and blogs of varying quality, and their security blog Threat Level is particularly good.

The best source for cyberculture news might be Twitter, though, provided you follow the right people. My account is @collopy, and I’ve made a list of some Twitter users relevant to this course that you can subscribe to, including the authors of texts on this syllabus. If you find anything online you’d like to share with the class, please tweet it using the (admittedly silly) hashtag #cyberpenn.

Reading

Please find a list of required readings below. Many readings are freely available online (and linked here), and I will make most of the others available to students. The exception is From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner, the one book we’ll be reading in its entirety, which is available for sale at the Penn Book Center and for borrowing at Van Pelt Library’s Rosengarten Reserve Room. Other books are also available at the Penn Book Center for those who would like to own them.

Foundations

• May 21: Introduction

  • Mitchell Kapor and John Perry Barlow, “Across the Electronic Frontier” (1990).
  • John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996).
  • Bruce Schneier, “Power and the Internet” (2013).

• May 23: Hackers

  • Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), chapters 1 and 2.
  • Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2009), chapter 16.
  • Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums” (originally in Rolling Stone, 1972).

• May 28: Cybernetics

  • Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006), introduction and chapters 1–4.

• May 30: Networks (“The New Economy”)

  • Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, chapters 5–8.

Virtual Community

• June 4: Virtuality

  • Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society” (originally in The Village Voice, 1993).
  • Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), chapters 7–9.

• June 6: Identity

  • Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (2002), introduction and chapters 1, 2, and 5.

• June 11: Play

  • Bonnie Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (2010), prologue, chapters 1, 2, and 6–9, and coda.

• June 13: Networks (Social Network Sites)

  • danah boyd, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life” (2007).
  • danah boyd, “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” (2011).
  • Nathan Jurgenson, “When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution” (2012).

Politics

• June 18: Sovereignty

  • Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0 (2006, revised from 1999), prefaces and chapters 1–5.

• June 20: Resistance

  • Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information (2012), prologue and chapters 1, 3, and 4.
  • Gabriella Coleman, “Our Weirdness Is Free” (2012).

• June 25: Algorithms

  • Tarleton Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms” (2012).
  • Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (2011), introduction and chapters 1, 4, and 6.

• June 27: Networks (Infrastructure)

  • Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (2012), prologue and chapters 1, 2, and 7.

Skinner isn’t exactly proposing direct action, but the president’s staff on The West Wing clearly consider this sort of activist politics beneath them. Josh is dismissive not, it seems to me, because it’s a bad idea, but simply because it’s not the way establishment liberals do things. “It’s a heck of a strategy, Matt,” he says. “I’ll bring that up at a meeting.”

As American started talking seriously about gun control in the weeks after December’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, this scene played over and over in my head. What if a lobbying organization like the National Rifle Association could be made responsive to the public—or at least to those who care enough about its issue to join whether they agree with its current political stances or not? At the very least, this fictional congressman had a more creative approach to gun control activism than the ineffective assault weapons bans championed by many Democratic legislators.

If the NRA is any kind of democracy, it’s representative rather than direct, so I started looking into how the NRA’s Board of Directors is elected. While the Association’s policies regarding elections aren’t available online, you can find blogs where members gripe about the system’s shortcomings and occasionally describe it in some detail. I was intrigued enough to write to the NRA and ask for a copy of their bylaws, which they were kind enough to mail me.

My conclusion is that Skinner’s idea wouldn’t work. Even if you could persuade three million—or five million, or ten million—progressives to join the NRA, the organization’s bylaws ensure they couldn’t take it over. Aaron Sorkin frequently says in interviews he can “write about people who are smarter than I am and know more than I do, and I am able to do that simply by being tutored almost phonetically, sometimes.” Much of what passes for intelligence among his characters is merely cleverness. It would not be difficult for an actual Republican congressman to understand that the NRA can resist conquest by “gun control people.” For the rest of us, however, here’s how it works:

In addition to a fairly typical clause offering membership only to those “who subscribe… to the objectives and purposes of the Association,” the bylaws bar new members from voting unless they purchase a “Life Membership,” currently available for $1000. Article III, section 6, item e, part 1 states that only “lifetime members and annual members with five or more consecutive years of membership… who have attained the age of 18 years and who are citizens of the United States of American shall be entitled to a vote” when electing Directors.

The bylaws also prescribe the process by which aspiring Directors of the NRA get their names on the ballot. Most are nominated by a Nominating Committee (on which Mother Jones journalist Frank Smyth has some interesting reporting) appointed by the Board of Directors and thus unlikely to rock the boat. Alternately, a candidate may be placed on the ballot by a petition of a mere 250 signatures of members eligible to vote.

According to NRA member Jeff Knox, this petition process was instituted in 1977 as part of “a major member revolt at the annual meeting in Cincinnati [in which] a more politically aggressive faction grabbed the reigns of the organization.” As Rick Perlstein writes, it was in this coup that the NRA became more concerned with opposing gun control than with outdoor sports. Making the NRA more democratic by introducing petitions was a way to keep it accountable to a politically involved membership.

Now, though, the NRA’s membership is in favor of substantially more gun control than their leadership, even if it isn’t flooded with three million “gun control people”; 74% of NRA members support background checks for all gun purchases. There are a number of reasons why the NRA’s leadership doesn’t reflect membership opinion, but among them is surely that, according to Knox and other members, only 7% of eligible members vote. (This number is probably low, since it’s likely that many of the NRA’s Life Members are dead, but it’s still probable that only a minority of eligible members vote.) The shortest path to the NRA becoming a more moderate organization might be simply for moderates to run for the Board of Directors—by petition if necessary—and for other moderates to vote for them. The “hardliners” who made the NRA what it is today may have also left a way out.

As Zippay writes, “performance and visual artists, political activists, cybernetic theorists, filmmakers, Fluxus provocateurs, and self-described video freaks and electronic geeks all contributed to the fluid mix—and creative friction—of the emergent video art scene.” She portrays this diversity of early video by bringing together 15 video productions and eight related films from 1970, 1971, and 1972. This tight periodization means the show, like an archaeological dig site, reveals a single stratum of video’s early history rather than a chronology of video art.

The most fascinating works are those sometimes described as video verité, which provide glimpses into an unrehearsed past. In Mayday Realtime, for example, David Cort walks and drives around Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971, documenting antiwar demonstrations and the police response. Cort, founder of a video collective called the Videofreex who lived in a communal house in the Catskills, consistently turned up with a camera at countercultural events like the Woodstock Festival and the Chicago Seven trial.

Shirley Clarke’s The Tee Pee Video Space Troupe: The First Years portrays cultural moments both more mundane and more glamorous than Cort’s May Day. In one segment, Clarke carouses with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol. “Video gives me something to do at parties,” Clarke tells the audience with an intertitle. Like many other videographers, Clarke—already an Academy Award winning filmmaker—was fascinated by the unique features of the video medium. As she tells a silent, posing Ono, her camera recorded sound, as film cameras could not. (Recording sound for film requires separate recording equipment.)

In the second segment of The Tee Pee Video Space Troupe, Shirley Clarke and Arthur C. Clarke—no relation—experiment with the interactions between two new gadgets. The science fiction writer points a laser at the filmmaker’s video camera, producing beautiful “sunbursts” and kaleidoscopic images. She has set up monitors displaying the video being recorded, so he watches himself and the abstractions he produces in real time, a mirroring practice characteristic of experimental video.

Indeed, many of the more explicitly artistic videos in Circa 1971 are subversive self-portraits. Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll consists of sensual explorations of the artist’s body interrupted by the vertical rolling characteristic of a poorly calibrated CRT television in time to a violent clanging sound. This disruption of the viewing experience challenges viewers to question the routine objectification of women’s bodies. Similarly, in I Am Making Art John Baldessari challenges the category of art itself by incessantly repeating the titular phrase while moving through the video frame.

As Zippay notes in her essay, these pieces convey “an analog—that is, slowed-down—experience of time” compared to that of 2012. The sparse arrangement of the self portraits—displayed on large video monitors set along the wall of the gallery like paintings, with no seating—compounds this sense of slowness. Since each of six is around 20 minutes long, I found myself circulating among them, returning to those I’d already watched for a few minutes to see how the artists were doing.

Experimental videographers generally embraced the ability to record continuously afforded by cheap tape—which, if you ran out, could also be recorded over. The ideal of cinema without editing pioneered by Warhol on film (and at least once on video) became common among videographers, and is evidenced here both by documentary works like Mayday Realtime and consciously artistic ones like I Am Making Art. It was often in editing, though, that experimental video most effectively demonstrated its emotional range.

In a series of Media Primers, three members of the video collective Raindance edited together segments from their diverse tape collection. I was particularly struck by Ira Schneider’s contribution, perhaps the least cerebral of the three, in which a hippie playing guitar and singing euphorically is intercut with footage of a campaign event for Richard Nixon and scuffles in the audience at Altamont.

Circa 1971 also includes a handful of short films from the era, which are projected rather than displayed on CRTs. TV Cello Premiere by Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, shown at the exhibit’s entrance, depicts one of Paik’s collaborations with Charlotte Moorman. The cellist played a one-stringed cello constructed by Paik, TV Cello, which displayed the performance, other cellists, and broadcast television on its three TV screens.

Many of the works in Circa 1971, most notably TV Cello Premiere and Vertical Roll, reveal particular technical features of the video technology used to create them. This is not the technology on which they’re displayed, however; despite being about analog media, Circa 1971 is an exhibit of digital reproductions. Given the fragility and glitchiness of analog video, such concessions to practicality are necessary to display this work, but they leave the analog video medium itself absent from the gallery. An exhibit which more fully portrayed analog video as both a technology and an artistic medium might feature a portapak on a pedestal in the center of the gallery, surrounded by the art it helped create.

Intriguingly, Morozov traces cyber-utopianism to “former hippies’” attempts “to prove that the Internet could deliver what the 1960s couldn’t: boost democratic participation, trigger a renaissance of moribund communities, strengthen associational life, and serve as a bridge from bowling alone to blogging together.” Morozov is right that the counterculture had some influence on the cyber-utopianism of today, but it’s perhaps deeper than he acknowledges. Hippies did not wait for the emergence of the internet to embrace the vision of a networked society; rather, the countercultural politics of the 1960s already incorporated a belief in the democratizing power of decentralized, electronic media. Indeed, despite Sullivan’s suggestion that the people’s power is unprecedented, one can find rhetoric virtually identical to his decades earlier.

The focus of this earlier cyber-utopianism was on breaking the oligopoly of broadcast television with cable television, satellites, and other new electronic technologies. Central to this vision was a portable device designed, like the cell phone, for an individual user: Sony’s VideoRover II, released in 1968. This portapak, as users called it, was much lighter and less imposing than traditional television cameras. From the beginning, users interpreted it as a new medium for artistic and political expression. In his 1972 memoir The Stoned Apocalypse, spiritual seeker and prolific erotica writer Marco Vassi anticipated Sullivan by 37 years: “The enthusiasm for videotape,” he wrote, “came from the evenings we spent using the equipment with each other, to create portraits, and modes of psychological insight, and sheer technological art. I suppose we all had our first flashes of power through those sessions, the realization that if one had access to the technology, he had as strong a voice in shaping the destiny of the world as the politicians and generals.” Many also saw video as an inherently democratic technology that would distribute this power to be heard more equitably.

This ideology was most fully elaborated by the video collective Raindance, particularly in Michael Shamberg’s 1971 book Guerrilla Television. Shamberg, who went on to become a Hollywood producer, presented television itself as a revolutionary technology which had already created a new “electronic environment,” “Media-America.” He was a technological determinist who believed that society was structured by its media; politics was mere superstructure which would follow automatically. “It’s nostalgia,” he wrote, “to think that… balance can be restored politically when politics are a function of Media-America, not vice-versa. Only through a radical re-design of its information structures to incorporate two-way, decentralized inputs can Media-America optimize the feedback it needs to come back to its senses.”

Shamberg’s influences are evident even in this short quotation. Foremost among them was media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who proposed that electronic media were creating a new social environment for humanity, a highly participatory “global village.” McLuhan’s research assistant Paul Ryan (no relation to the politician) was an experimental videographer who associated with Raindance; it was Ryan who developed the metaphor Shamberg employed of videography as guerrilla warfare in an article in Raindance’s magazine Radical Software. Both McLuhan and Ryan were in turn deeply influenced by the Jesuit paleontologist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, particularly his interpretation of human communication as constituting a global mind or “noosphere.” A more effective noosphere—a “videophere,” in art critic Gene Youngblood’s terminology—became the political ideal of experimental videography.

More concretely, Shamberg believed that video would revolutionize particular social relations. “Going out to the suburbs with video cameras and taping commuters,” for example, could show them “how wasted they look from buying the suburban myth.” Being videotaped could sensitize police and prevent brutality. Shamberg’s technological optimism focused specifically on communication technology, as he saw new forms of television and other media as both the sources of social change and the proper replacements for an obsolete political sphere.

There were also those who warned against seeing video as a source of social change, though. Among them was Vassi, himself a founding member of Raindance. “There is some talk, and there will be more, in so-called underground tape circles about the revolutionary impact of tape,” wrote Vassi in Radical Software. “I think it’s too late for all that. Every innovation in technology brought about by heads will be used by the power-trip neanderthals to furnish a more sophisticated 1984.… I think the thing to watch out for is this: That there be as little talking about all this as possible, not to keep the enemy from overhearing or any of that nonsense, but to guard against coming to believe one’s own rhetoric.”

All of which brings us back to the recent past. In January 2010, a few months after the Iranian uprising, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech, “Remarks on Internet Freedom,” at the Newseum in Washington. “The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet,” she told her audience. “When something happens in Haiti or Hunan, the rest of us learn about it in real time—from real people.” Clinton invoked the same emphasis on direct communication—media without mediation—which Shamberg celebrated in video and Sullivan in Twitter, and the same notion of a global mind which McLuhan and Ryan found in Teilhard. ”Now, in many respects, information has never been so free,” Clinton continued, agreeing with countercultural entrepreneur Stewart Brand, who declared in 1984 that “information wants to be free.”

Clinton’s optimism was tempered, though. “We must also recognize that these technologies are not an unmitigated blessing,” she continued. “These tools are also being exploited to undermine human progress and political rights.” Beyond that, we should heed Vassi’s warning and recognize the threat that we will be seduced by our tools and their false but persistent promise of revolutionary change without our active political effort. These information technologies can contribute to the success of political movements, but not if their users see them as replacements for political life.

As Aaron Bady points out, the LRAD brings together violence and speech. “To ask the question of whether an LRAD is designed to hurt people or designed to communicate across long distances with people,” writes Bady, “is to mystify its central design function: It is a technology whose purpose is to FORCE you to listen and obey, and one which is less interested in the difference than you’d think.” The LRAD makes it impossible to think of policing—particularly the iconic “order to disperse” delivered to political demonstrators from Chicago in 1886 to Pittsburgh in 2009 (shown above)—as a process in which orders come first and force follows only in the case of disobedience. The medium through which orders are communicated is itself forceful; the LRAD is a weapon, which is why the LRAD Corporation sells it, according to their fact sheet, “only to qualified government agencies and commercial entities that are fully trained in the device’s operation.” Bady concludes, then, that the LRAD demonstrates policing is “simply about power. Communication is a means of making you obey,” and, from the perspective of the LRAD, nothing more.

The LRAD conflates communication and force not only conceptually but materially: The same sound serves both purposes. It thus taps into a deep seam in twentieth century science and philosophy that is concerned precisely with the relationship between communication and action. It could be interpreted, for instance, in terms of speech act theory: A loud LRAD order to disperse is both a threatening speech act and itself an act of force.

Since the use of violence to establish control is intrinsic to the LRAD, though, its collapsing of communication and force resonates less with speech acts than the mid-century science of cybernetics. As MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener subtitled his 1948 book in which he named the discipline, cybernetics involved the study of “control and communication in the animal and machine.” The field developed in the late 1940s through collaborations between scientists interested in understanding minds, societies, and machines in the same terms—collaborations such as the Macy Conferences—and cyberneticians conflated control and communication in part to establish parallels between these different entities. This collapsing of categories also owed something, though, to the origins of cybernetics in military research.

Wiener did much of his thinking about analogies between humans and mechanical control systems during World War II while designing an “antiaircraft predictor,” designed to aim a gun in order to shoot down a maneuvering plane. Such a predictor was necessary because during the twenty seconds a shell took to reach its target, the pilot would maneuver, apparently unpredictably. In his article “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision” and a followup interview in Cabinet, historian of science Peter Galison argues that Wiener conceived of the enemy pilot as essentially mechanical, and his predictor as a machine that mirrored its behavior. “With no access to anything in the enemy plane,” he says, “Wiener simply treated the pilot-plane assembly as a complex machine—a servomechanism—that once characterized could be simulated in order to predict what it would do. And then it could be blown out of the sky.”

Although Wiener’s work stood in a long tradition of control engineering—since his goal was simply to control a gun—his system also relied on interpreting the plane’s motions as communication to the predictor, which then “learned” its patterns by observing with radar. Even though, “because of the antagonistic relationship between attacker and defender, the anti-aircraft operator was obviously in no position to talk to or even see the pilot,” the latter’s movements still revealed—communicated—his intentions. From Wiener’s perspective as an engineer, though, there was no distinction between control and communication in this system; both were simply messages. There were messages conveyed by the pilot to the plane (through a joystick, say), from the plane to the predictor (through radar), from the predictor to the gun (through a mechanical connection), and from the gun to the plane (through a shell), but each relationship was one of both control and communication, of both force and speech.

The U.S. military also embraced this conflation. During the decades after World War II “command and control,” previously two competing models of military management, became a single practice. Command traditionally involved an officer giving an order which was then interpreted and implemented by those below him in a hierarchy, often as more specific commands to their subordinates. It involved the ambiguity we expect from human communication, if not the dialogue. Control, on the other hand, was direct and (at least ideally) unambiguous. Nuclear weapons, which had to be deployed rapidly and only upon the decision of senior commanders, were subject to control rather than command. This distinction collapsed, though, as nuclear weapons were integrated into conventional military tactics. “By the early 1960s,” writes historian of technology Paul Edwards in The Closed World, “military parlance treated the two as virtually identical. A decade later, ‘command, control, communications, and information’ (C³I) had become a single unified process.”

It is from this postwar military ideology that the LRAD and its inventor Elwood Norris emerged. According to his speaking bio, Norris served in the Air Force as a nuclear weapons specialist in the 1950s before becoming an independent inventor. He was hired by the Navy to design the LRAD in 2000 after the U.S.S. Cole bombing, and the original purpose of the device was to deter guerrillas from U.S. warships. It has since been used to deter Somali pirates from commercial ships and “to blast a series of Arabic phrases, such as ‘Go away or we will kill you,’” in Baghdad and Fallujah.

The LRAD, then, is a military technology that has come home to U.S. soil as a command-and-control system for conveying both orders and force from police to civilians. Its erasure of the distinction between control and communication is not a unique phenomenon that emerges when you build a very loud speaker; rather, its inventor designed a speaker loud enough to “influence behavior and create safety zones” because he and his employers already conflated force and speech.

If you’ve come here after asking yourself (or Google) what cybernetics is, I recommend starting with Bernard Geoghegan and Benjamin Peters’ entry “Cybernetics,” from the International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, and Geoffrey Bowker’s “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70.” Ronald Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment is the synthetic history the field has been waiting for. William Aspray’s “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey” places cybernetics in the context of developments in computing and information theory, while Peter Galison’s “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision” is a classic account of the field’s military origins. The texts listed below survey the many forms cybernetics took in the decades that followed.

This bibliography is limited in three ways: It includes only books and articles which focus on cybernetics rather than the related histories of cyborgs and information theory; it includes only texts in English, though there are also substantial literatures on the subject in other languages; and it excludes articles and dissertations that have been superseded by books by the same authors. Within these limitations, I welcome references to additional books and articles. I last updated this list in April 2026.

The Big Picture (but mostly Anglo-American)

1. A. A. Verveen, “In Search of Processes: The Early History of Cybernetics,” Mathematical Biosciences 11 (1971).
2. Michael Apter, “Cybernetics: A Case Study of a Scientific Subject-Complex,” in The Sociology of Science, edited by Paul Halmos (University of Keele, 1972).
3. Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory: An Ideological Analysis (Wiley, 1978).
4. Geoffrey Bowker, “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70,” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993).
5. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
6. Charles François, “Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 16 (1999).
7. Debora Hammond, The Science of Synthesis: Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory (University Press of Colorado, 2003).
8. Geoffrey Bowker, “The Empty Archive: Cybernetics and the 1960s,” in Memory Practices in the Sciences (MIT Press, 2006).
9. Bernard Geoghegan, “The Historiographic Conceptualization of Information: A Critical Survey,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30 (2008).
10. John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (MIT Press, 2008).
11. Philipp Aumann, “The Distinctiveness of a Unifying Science: Cybernetics’ Way to West Germany” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33 (2011).
12. Orit Halpern, “Cybernetic Sense,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
13. Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2014).
14. Ronald Kline, The Cybernetics Moment; or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
15. Claus Pias, “The Age of Cybernetics,” in Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences, 1946–1954; The Complete Transactions (diaphanes, 2016).
16. Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (Norton, 2016).
17. Bernard Geoghegan and Benjamin Peters, “Cybernetics,” International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (2016).
18. Elizabeth Petrick, “Building the Black Box: Cyberneticians and Complex Systems,” Science, Technology, and Human Values (2019).

Origins

1. Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback Control (MIT Press, 1970).
2. William Aspray, “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 7 (1985).
3. David Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

United States

1. Peter Galison, “The Americanization of Unity,” Daedalus 127 (1998).
2. Peter Krieg, “The Human Face of Cybernetics: Heinz von Foerster and the History of a Movement That Failed,” Kybernetes 34 (2005).
3. Stuart Umpleby, “A History of the Cybernetics Movement in the United States,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 91 (2005).
4. Christopher Johnson, “Analogue Apollo: Cybernetics and the Space Age,” Paragraph 31 (2008).

Norbert Wiener

1. Steve Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (MIT Press, 1982).
2. Pesi Masani, Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964 (Birkhauser, 1990).
3. Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1994).
4. Felix Geyer and Johannes van der Zouwen, “Norbert Wiener and the Social Sciences,” Kybernetes 23 (1994).
5. David Jerison and Daniel Stroock, “Norbert Wiener,” The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium (1997).
6. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (Basic Books, 2004).
7. Mara Mills, “On Disability and Cybernetics: Helen Keller, Norbert Wiener, and the Hearing Glove,” differences 22 (2011).
8. Benjamin Peters, “Toward a Genealogy of a Cold War Communication Science: The Strange Loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener,” Russian Journal of Communication 5 (2013).
9. Henning Schmidgen, “Cybernetic Times: Norbert Wiener, John Stroud, and the ‘Brain Clock’ Hypothesis,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).

Soviet and Comparative Studies

1. David Holloway, “Innovation in Science—The Case of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union,” Science Studies 4 (1974).
2. Peter Elias, “The Rise and Fall of Cybernetics in the US and the USSR,” The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium (1997).
3. Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT Press, 2002).
4. David Mindell, Jérôme Segal, and Slava Gerovitch, “From Communications Engineering to Communications Science: Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union,” in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History, edited by Mark Walker (Routledge, 2003).
5. Benjamin Peters, “Betrothal and Betrayal: The Soviet Translation of Norbert Wiener’s Early Cybernetics,” International Journal of Communications 2 (2008).
6. Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016).
7. Adam Leeds, “Dreams in Cybernetic Fugue: Cold War Technoscience, the Intelligentsia, and the Birth of Soviet Mathematical Economics,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46 (2016).
8. Diana Kurkovsky West, “Cybernetics for the Command Economy: Foregrounding Entropy in Late Soviet Planning,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
9. Joshua Sanborn, “Cybernetics and Surveillance: The Secret Police Enter the Computer Age,” Kritika 23 (2022).

France and “French Theory”

1. Céline Lafontaine, “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory,’” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007).
2. Lydia Liu, “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory,” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010).
3. Jacob Krell, “What is the ‘Cybernetic’ in the ‘History of Cybernetics’? A French Case, 1968 to the Present,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
4. Vincent August, “Network Concepts in Social Theory: Foucault and Cybernetics,” European Journal of Social Theory 24 (2021).
5. Bernard Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke University Press, 2023)

Chile

1. Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011).
2. Martin Collins, introduction to forum on Cybernetic Revolutionaries, History and Technology 28 (2012).
3. Michael Dennis, “Scientific and Technical Knowledge and the Making of Political Order,” History and Technology 28 (2012).
4. Ronald Kline, “Beyond the Closed World,” History and Technology 28 (2012).
5. Tiago Saraiva, “The History of Cybernetics in McOndo,” History and Technology 28 (2012).
6. Eden Medina, author response to forum on Cybernetic Revolutionaries, History and Technology 28 (2012).

Biology

1. Donna Haraway, “The Biological Enterprise: Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human Engineering to Sociobiology,” Radical History Review no. 20 (1979).
2. Donna Haraway, “The High Cost of Information in Post World War II Evolutionary Biology: Ergonomics, Semiotics, and the Sociobiology of Communications Systems,” Philosophical Forum 13 (1981–2).
3. Donna Haraway, “Signs of Dominance: From a Physiology to a Cybernetics of Primate Society, C.R. Carpenter, 1930–1970,” in Studies in History of Biology 6, edited by William Coleman and Camille Limoges (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
4. Donna Haraway, “A Semiotics of the Naturalistic Field, from C.R. Carpenter to S.A. Altmann, 1930–55,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989).
5. Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Body of a New Machine: Situating the Organism between Telegraphs and Computers,” in Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (Columbia University Press, 1995).
6. Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford University Press, 2000).
7. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Taming the Cybernetic Metaphor” in Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (Harvard University Press, 2002).
8. Warwick Anderson and Ian MacKay, “The Science of Self,” in Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Ecology

1. Peter Taylor, “Technocratic Optimism, H.T. Odum, and the Partial Transformation of Ecological Metaphor after World War II,” Journal of the History of Biology 21 (1988).
2. Sharon Kingsland, “Defining the Ecosystem,” in The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890–2000 (John Hopkins University Press, 2005).
3. William Bryant, “Whole System, Whole Earth: The Convergence of Technology and Ecology in Twentieth-Century American Culture” (doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 2006).
4. Bruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics of Gaia: The Emergence of Second-Order Gaia Theory,” in Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, edited by Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker (MIT Press, 2010).
5. Nancy Slack, “Good Friends: Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson” in G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention of Modern Ecology (Yale University Press, 2010).
6. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in ’70s America (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Social Sciences

1. Steve Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946–1953 (MIT Press, 1991).
2. George Richardson, Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
3. Esther-Mirjam Sent, “Herbert A. Simon as a Cyborg Scientist,” Perspectives on Science 8 (2000).
4. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
5. Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
6. Hunter Heyck, Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
7. Stefanos Geroulanos and Leif Weatherby, “Cybernetics and the Human Sciences” special issue introduction, History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
8. Ronald Kline, “How Disunity Matters to the History of Cybernetics in the Human Sciences in the United States, 1940–80,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
9. Poornima Paidipaty, “‘Tortoises All the Way Down’: Geertz, Cybernetics and ‘Culture’ at the End of the Cold War,” Anthropological Theory 20 (2020).

Gregory Bateson

1. David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (Prentice Hall, 1980).
2. John Tresch, “Heredity is an Open System: Gregory Bateson as Descendant and Ancestor,” Anthropology Today 14 (1998).
3. Leone Montagnini, “Looking for ‘Scientific’ Social Science: The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics in Bateson’s Itinerary,” Kybernetes 36 (2007).
4. Frank Thomas, Rebekah Waits, and Gail Hartsfield, “The Influence of Gregory Bateson: Legacy or Vestige?” Kybernetes 36 (2007).
5. William Kaizen, “Steps to an Ecology of Communication: Radical Software, Dan Graham, and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson,” Art Journal 67 (2008).
6. Erik Peterson, “Finding Mind, Form, Organism, and Person in a Reductionist Age: The Challenge of Gregory Bateson and C. H. Waddington to Biological and Anthropological Orthodoxy, 1924–1980” (doctoral dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2010).
7. Orit Halpern, “Schizophrenic Techniques: Cybernetics, the Human Sciences, and the Double Bind,” S&F Online 10 (2012).
8. Peter Harries-Jones, Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference (Fordham University Press, 2016).
9. Anthony Chaney, Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Sciences of Mind

1. Geir Kirkebøen, “From a Naked Emperor to Just Clothes: The Rise and Fall of Cybernetic Family Therapy,” Social Science Information 34 (1995).
2. James Anderson and Edward Rosenfeld, Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks (MIT Press, 1998).
3. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: The Origins of Cognitive Science, translated by M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton University Press, 2000).
4. Roberto Cordeschi, The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).
5. Tara Abraham, “From Theory to Data: Representing Neurons in the 1940s,” Biology and Philosophy 18 (2003).
6. Tara Abraham, “Cybernetics and Theoretical Approaches in 20th-Century Brain and Behavior Sciences,” Biological Theory 1 (2006).
7. Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
8. Rebecca Lemov, “Running Amok in Labyrinthine Systems: The Cyber-Behaviorist Origins of Soft Torture,” Limn 1 (2011).
9. Deborah Weinstein, “‘Systems Everywhere’: Schizophrenia, Cybernetics, and the Double Bind,” in The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy (Cornell University Press, 2013).
10. John Shiga, “Of Other Networks: Closed-World and Green-World Networks in the Work of John C. Lilly,” Amodern 2 (2013).
11. Chen-Pang Yeang, “From Modernizing the Chinese Language to Information Science: Chao Yuen Ren’s Route to Cybernetics,” Isis 108 (2017).
12. Danielle Judith Zola Carr, “‘Ghastly Marionettes’ and the Political Metaphysics of Cognitive Literalism: Anti-Behaviourism, Language, and the Origins of Totalitarianism,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
13. Christina Vagt, “Design as Aesthetic Education: On the Politics and Aesthetics of Learning Environments,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
14. Katja Guenther, “The Dancing Robot: Grey Walter’s Cybernetic Mirror,” in The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts

1. Michael Arbib, “Warren McCulloch’s Search for the Logic of the Nervous System,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43 (2000).
2. Neil Smalheiser, “Walter Pitts,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43 (2000).
3. Lily Kay, “From Logical Neurons to Poetic Embodiments of Mind: Warren S. McCulloch’s Project in Neuroscience,” Science in Context 14 (2001).
4. Tara Abraham, “Integrating Mind and Brain: Warren S. McCulloch, Cerebral Localization, and Experimental Epistemology,” Endeavour 27 (2003).
5. Kenneth Aizawa, “Warren McCulloch’s Turn to Cybernetics: What Walter Pitts Contributed,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
6. Phil Husbands and Owen Holland, “Warren McCulloch and the British Cyberneticians,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
7. Alan Collins, “An Asymmetric Relationship: The Spirit of Kenneth Craik and the Work of Warren McCulloch,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 37 (2012).
8. Tara Abraham, Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (MIT Press, 2016).

Politics and Planning

1. Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996).
2. Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
3. Jennifer Light, “Taking Games Seriously,” Technology and Culture 49 (2008).
4. Antoine Bousquet, “Cyberneticizing the American War Machine: Science and Computers in the Cold War,” Cold War History 8 (2008).
5. Brian Holmes, Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (Van Abbemuseum, 2009).
6. Matthew Ferish, “The Cybernetic Continent: North America as Defense Laboratory,” in The Contours of America’s Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
7. John Duda, “Cybernetics, Anarchism and Self-Organisation,” Anarchist Studies 21 (2013).
8. David Bates, “The Political Theology of Entropy: A Katechon for the Cybernetic Age,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
9. Nicolas Guilhot, “Automatic Leviathan: Cybernetics and Politics in Carl Schmitt’s Postwar Writings,” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2020).
10. Joakim Parslow, “The Mechanical Atatürk: Cybernetics and State Violence in the Second Turkish Republic,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53 (2021).
11. Thomas Swann, “Anarchist Cybernetics,” Perspectives in Anarchist Theory 33 (2023).

Popular Culture and Counterculture

1. Ron Eglash, “Cybernetics in American Youth Subculture,” Cultural Studies 12 (1998).
2. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
3. Bruce Clarke, “From Information to Cognition: The Systems Counterculture, Heinz von Foerster’s Pedagogy, and Second-Order Cybernetics,” Constructivist Foundations 7 (2012).
4. Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro, “How Cybernetics Connects Computing, Counterculture, and Design,” in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, edited by Andrew Blauvelt (2015).

Art

1. Mary Louise Lobsinger, “Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price’s Fun Palace,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Canadian Center for Architecture, 2000).
2. Edward Shanken, “Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s,” in From Energy to Information, edited by Bruce Clarke and Linda Henderson (Stanford University Press, 2002).
3. Maria Fernandez, “Gordon Pask: Cybernetic Polymath,” Leonardo 41 (2008).
4. Maria Fernandez, “Detached from HiStory: Jasia Reichardt and Cybernetic Serendipity,” Art Journal 67 (2008).
5. Etan J. Ilfeld, “Contemporary Art and Cybernetics: Waves of Cybernetic Discourse within Conceptual, Video and New Media Art,” Leonardo 45 (2012).
6. Etienne Benson, “Environment between System and Nature: Alan Sonfist and the Art of the Cybernetic Environment,” communication +1 3 (2014).

Film and Video

1. David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007).
2. Zabet Patterson, “From the Gun Controller to the Mandala: The Cybernetic Cinema of John and James Whitney,” Grey Room no. 36 (2009).
3. Andrew Syder, ““Shaken Out of the Ruts of Ordinary Perception”: Vision, Culture and Technology in the Psychedelic Sixties” (doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, 2009).
4. Kris Paulsen, “Half Inch Revolution: The Guerilla Video Tape Network,” Amodern 2 (2013).
5. Carolyn Kane, “The Tragedy of Radical Subjectivity: From Radical Software to Proprietary Subjects,” Leonardo 47, no. 5 (2014).
6. Peter Sachs Collopy, “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s” (doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2015).
7. Ute Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

Sound and Music

1. Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950–1980,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35 (2010).
2. Jonathan Sterne, “Nature Builds No Telephones” and “Perceptual Coding and the Domestication of Noise,” in MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2013).
3. Christopher Haworth, “Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Resonance 2 (2021).
4. Deirdre Loughridge, “Daphne Oram: Cyberneticist?” Resonance 2 (2021).
5. Eamonn Bell, “Cybernetics, Listening, and Sound-Studio Phenomenotechnique in Abraham Moles’s Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958),” Resonance 2 (2021).
6. Clara Latham, “The Sound Machine in the Body: Cybernetics and the Theremin,” Resonance 2 (2021).
7. Eric Drott, “Music and the Cybernetic Mundane,” Resonance 2 (2021).
8. Theodore Gordon, “‘Androgynous Music’: Pauline Oliveros’s Early Cybernetic Improvisation,” Contemporary Music Review 40 (2022).

The Second Self portrays a time of relative innocence [in the early 1980s]. There was not much talk of screen violence and there seemed to be so much time. The fact that “regular” people, from home computer hobbyists to fifth-grade teachers, were still discussing the merits of computer programming as an intellectual pastime gave the sense that there was time to think, time to experiment with new forms, time to look at effects. Today, the computer culture acts on the individual with new speed and ferocity.

Sherry Turkle, “Epilogue (2004),” The Second Self 20th Anniversary Edition

This paragraph prompted me to reread David Brin’s 2006 essay “Why Johnny Can’t Code,” another attempt to answer the question of why kids don’t learn to program like they did in the 1980s. It’s a stirring essay, but it’s conclusion is merely that no one is providing “tools that teach creative thinking and technological mastery.” This begs another level of analysis—why aren’t these tools available to kids?—and Turkle provides part of it. I’m going to try to take her conclusion a step further.

We’ve come to see computers as tools for efficiency, not exploration. Sure, “surfing the web” has seen a resurgence in Wikipedia link-hopping, but I suspect even this is a minority activity. And even this is not an exploration of the computer. The meaning of the computer is less contested now than it was in decades past: computers are tools now, not worlds and certainly not the “mathland” Seymour Papert saw in them. It is as tools that teachers see computers, that managers see computers, that the developers at Microsoft and Apple see the interfaces they’re giving us. And they’re developers, not programmers, because they’re focused on the product of software, not the practice of programming.

Is there room in this world for programming as an intellectual pastime? Of course there is. That spirit is with us in free software and in other hacker communities. But hacking has become countercultural again, like it was in the 1970s. The idea that programming is worthwhile for the lessons it provides about logic, math, systems, and philosophy is as marginal now as it has ever been. The idea that it’s the best way for kids to learn these lessons is even more marginal.

All of this, Turkle hints, is not because computers themselves are marginal but precisely because they’re central to our lives. We have to learn so much just to use them—and we think that we have to teach so much to kids—that there’s no time for thinking, for experimenting with new forms, for looking at effects. If the geeky among us, adult and child alike, do find a spare hour, our “information consumption devices”—Brin’s phrase—rush to fill it. The personal computer has become less so, a device for listening like the radio before it.

Brin’s essay is structured around a quest for a tool his son can use to learn to program. He and his son eventually conclude that this tool is not, as they expected, some software that they can install on their Mac OS X or Windows machines; it is, instead, a used Commodore 64, released in 1982. It is a machine that does not connect to the internet and the web, a machine for which it has become a challenge to find software (not to mention that their floppy drive doesn’t really work). It’s a computer built with a set of purposes almost entirely different from those of a 2005 Dell box. Tinkerers, hobbyists, and gamers bought the Commodore 64; everyone buys Dells, which are supposed to have a practical function. The Commodore 64 boots to a BASIC prompt; any modern machine boots to a GUI. There is very little about computers built in the last twenty years that invites experimentation.

Epilogue

I’m bothered by Brin’s preference for BASIC over other programming languages his son could learn. There are two options that strike me as superior. The first is Logo. It was actually designed for education, and depending on the implementation it can do lots of exciting things. (The technology education consulting company I used to work for endorses Terrapin Logo, which looks pretty cool.) The second is Ruby. There’s a Ruby interpreter you can try without even leaving your browser, with a really amazing built-in tutorial. It’s at least a way to discover how a command line feels, which is pretty cool.

There is another path Brin and his son could have followed. They could have installed Linux, or Cygwin, or resorted to the Terminal application on their Mac, and turned their machine into one that does invite experimentation. It would have taken some tinkering to get it to work how they wanted it to, of course, but that too is a learning experience—one about which Brin seems strangely unenthusiastic. They could have closed their browsers and the other ethereal apparatus of computing as consumption, even booted the machine to a command line and vanished the distractions of the GUI. Our polished, functional information consumption devices are flexible; they can still be subverted and used like the messy, hobbyist learning machines of the early 1980s.

To begin with the basics, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can write and edit. It’s an ambitious project, and one with both positive and negative aspects. Ideally, Wikipedia will help democratize education, providing the same information for free to everyone with an internet connection. In the worst case, this will be misinformation, and the site will miseducate.

The vast majority of Wikipedia articles can actually be changed by anyone. If you go to any article, you’ll find an “edit this page” link at the top, allowing you to do exactly that. Because anyone can add to or change Wikipedia entries, there’s no guarentee that information will be accurate. For the very same reason, though, anyone who finds a mistake, lie, or even grammatical error in an article can correct in themselves, making it easy to improve articles. I’m convinced that the vast majority of information on Wikipedia is accurate, and that it deserves some role in educational institutions. I also believe, however, that this role should be carefully considered and limited, and that educators should understand the process by which Wikipedia functions, not only the articles that result from it.

One reason I think that educators should learn about Wikipedia is that students already are. Bill Tancer, a researcher for Hitwise who studies consumer behavior online, notes that many of the popular search terms that bring users to Wikipedia from sites like Google “bear a close resemblance to elementary school homework and research projects.”

During the month of February, which is also Black History month, three of the top 20 terms sending traffic to Wikipedia were for prominent black historical figures, while two other searches were likely motivated by Presidents Day. In fact, changing timeframes to any other month during the school year reveals a similar result.

Bill Tancer, “Look Who’s Using Wikipedia,”
Time, March 1, 2007.

If students are already using Wikipedia as a resource, it’s important that teachers understand it. You might find more to like than you expect. I’ll tell you a bit about three attractive features of Wikipedia, though I’ll mention some negative aspects along the way too. These will be citations, comprehensiveness, and the site’s history and discussion tools.

The topic of Wikipedia and education has already received some press, though it’s mostly dealt with higher education. The most discussed event was a decision by the history department at Middlebury College to ban citing of Wikipedia in student papers. What’s interesting to me about this decision is that it actually reflects a consensus of educators and Wikipedians that the site is best used as a starting place for research rather than as a student’s only source. The following quotation is from Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales.

The advice I would give to students is be careful how you use Wikipedia. It really isn’t a trusted source. It really is edited real-time and it could be full of mistakes.… I think it basically should be fine in schools… to add a footnote saying I did a lot of my preliminary research in Wikipedia, just to acknowledge where you got a lot of knowledge. But in terms of citing specific facts, you really should go to the sources and look it up there, because that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. The encyclopedia is supposed to give you the broad overview, not be a primary research tool…. I would say the same thing about Brittanica, by the way.

Jimmy Wales, net@nite 13,
February 13, 2007.

Citations

Fortunately, Wikipedia can be very helpful to those looking to find other sources on a subject. Articles generally have superscript links to endnotes interspersed throughout their text. There are many articles on the site without citations, but they are viewed by regular users as unpolished and in need of substantiation, while numerous citations are a hallmark of a good article. Today’s featured article on the site, about a polar bear named Knut, has 41 citations in a few pages of text. (Because Wikipedia is always changing, this might be different when you visit the article; you can see it as I did.) Because it’s about recent events, these citations all include links to stories in traditional news media, but articles also frequently cite books, academic journals, and other authoritative sources. The role of citations is so central on Wikipedia that they have come to be identified with the site.

Randall Munroe, “Wikipedian Protester,”
xkcd, 2007.

Comprehensiveness

Another attractive feature of Wikipedia is its comprehensiveness. The English language site has over two million articles, many of them quite long and thorough. There have been a few studies comparing the coverage and accuract of Wikipedia to traditionally edited commercial encyclopedias.

The historian Roy Rosenzweig published an article on Wikipedia a year and a half ago in which he compared the site to both Encarta and American National Biography Online.

To find 4 entries with errors in 25 biographies may seem a source for concern, but in fact it is exceptionally difficult to get every fact correct in reference works.… I checked 10 Encarta biographies for figures that also appear in Wikipedia, and in the commercial product I found at least 3 biographies with factual mistakes. Even the carefully edited American National Biography Online, whose biographies are written by experts, contains at least one factual error in the 25 entries I examined closely, the date of Nobel Prize winner I. I. Rabi’s doctoral degree—a date that Wikipedia gets right.…

Wikipedia, then, beats Encarta but not American National Biography Online in coverage and roughly matches Encarta in accuracy.

Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,”
The Journal of American History, June 2006.

American National Biography Online is a subscription service generally used by professional historians rather than students, so the performance of the free Wikipedia is pretty impressive. Also, Wikipedia generally improves in both accuracy and coverage as more people use and edit it, so Rosenzweig’s conclusions might be even more positive were he writing now.

The journal Nature, one of the two most prestigious in the sciences, published a similar comparison of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica’s web edition. They printed out copies of articles on the same topics from both websites without the source identified and sent them to experts. Their conclusions may be surprising:

Among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.…

Nature’s investigation suggests that Britannica’s advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia.…

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

Jim Giles, “Internet encyclopaedias go head to head,”
Nature, December 15, 2005.

Note that the Nature article is a couple of years old. I haven’t been able to find more recent such studies of the English language Wikipedia, though the magazine Stern did just publish an article on the German one under the heading “Wie gut ist Wikipedia?”

Stern said the Wikipedia’s average rating was 1.7 on a scale where 1 is best and 6 is worst. The Brockhaus rated 2.7 on the same measure.

The articles were assessed for accuracy, completeness, how up to date they were and how easy they were to read.

In 43 matches [out of 50], the Wikipedia article was judged the winner.

“Magazine hails German Wikipedia as better than encyclopaedia,”
Deutsche Presse-Agentur, December 5, 2007.

History and Discussion

The third attractive feature of Wikipedia is actually two features, the discussion and history pages. Every article has a set of links along the top. One of these links to the history of an article, which takes the form of a list of all the revisions that have been made. Because Wikipedia articles generally improve as more people edit them, simply looking at the number or frequency of these revisions can tell you something about the article. It's also possible, though, to click on the date of any one of these revisions and see how the article looked at that point in time. One can trace the development of an article all the way back to its original form, which is often only a sentence or two.

Another of these tabs at the top of an article to that article’s discussion page, also called the talk page. Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, researchers at the IBM Visual Communication Lab, describe it this way.

The talk page is where the writers for an article hash out their differences, plan future edits, and come to agreement about tricky rhetorical points. This kind of debate doubtless happens in the New York Times and Britannica as well, but behind the scenes. Wikipedia readers can see it all, and understand how choices were made.

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, “The Hive Mind Ain’t What It Used To Be,”
Edge, 2006.

The talk page is a great way to learn more about how an article is put together and decide how much to trust it. One can easily imagine a writer and editor at the New York Times arguing about whether an individual sentence or idea should appear in an article, but most of us never get to see this process in action. Wikipedia allows us to peel back the veil and see how our reference source is produced.

The article on Knut that I mentioned earlier is a “featured article,” selected because it’s particularly good. The range of article quality on Wikipedia is enormous, so now we’ll now look at an article that, while not exactly bad, isn’t up to the same standard. Garrett Morgan was an African American inventor who lived in Cleveland and is best known for his work on gas masks and traffic signals. His article on Wikipedia, unlike many websites run by museums and schools, does not claim that Morgan was the first to invent either the gas mask or the traffic signal. (The article has probably changed since I wrote this; you can see it as I did.) Most of the discussion page deals with these questions of priority, and specifically with whether to cite a website that provides apparently accurate descriptions of earlier inventions similar to Morgan’s, but appears to be motivated by racism. This is the sort of discussion from which one can learn a great deal, both about history and about how people use and learn from history.

The Garrett Morgan article also demonstrates something completely different: that the quality of writing on Wikipedia is often very poor. This is partly because of “writing by committee” and partly because many contributors are independently poor writers. Any user can take an article and improve its structure and grammer, but users are often more excited about writing new material. Below is an excerpt from the Morgan article:

It has often been claimed that Morgan invented the first “gas mask”, however, the first gas mask was invented by Scottish chemist John Stenhouse in 1854. A precursor to the “gas mask” had been invented by Lewis Haslett in 1847 and granted US Patent no. 6529 in 1859. Numerous other inventors, including, Charles Anthony Deane (1823), John Tyndall (1871), Samuel Barton (1874), George Neally (1877), Henry Fleuss (1878), before Morgan’s invention that was patented in 1914 (US Patent numbers 1090936 and 1113675), but does not diminish Morgan’s heroism in using his mask to rescue the men trapped in the tunnel explosion, which was undertaken at considerable personal risk.

Some claim that Morgan did not invent the first “gas mask”, however, those references are usually in reference to the “respirator.” Morgan invented the safety hood and later revised it, which was used to save trapped workers in the Lake Erie Crib Disaster of 1917. His safety hood eventually evolved to become a type of gas mask.

Wikipedia, “Garrett A. Morgan.”

I’ll leave finding the grammatical errors as an exercise to the reader, but it’s worth noticing that both paragraphs begin similarly but seem to be written without a clear awareness of each other. The writing does not flow, a common problem on Wikipedia. It’s also worth noticing, though, that the excerpt is not particularly hard to understand. It communicates sufficiently without doing so elegantly or grammatically. Wikipedia is a bad place to learn about writing style, but poor writing detracts only a little from its purpose as an encyclopedia.

Wikipedia should be looked at by educators as more than just a nuisance or a free encyclopedia. It's a potentially complicated tool, but one worth grappling with. I’ll close with the perspective of the researcher danah boyd, who studies relationships between youth and the internet:

If educators would shift their thinking about Wikipedia, so much critical thinking could take place. The key value of Wikipedia is its transparency. You can understand how a page is constructed, who is invested, what their other investments are. You can see when people disagree about content and how, in the discussion, the disagreement was resolved. None of our traditional print media make such information available. Understanding Wikipedia means knowing how to:

1. Understand the assembly of data and information into publications
2. Interpret knowledge
3. Question purported truths and vet sources
4. Analyze apparent contradictions in facts
5. Productively contribute to the large body of collective knowledge

danah boyd, “Information Access in a Networked World,”
talk presented to Pearson Publishing, November 2, 2007.

For further reading, I recommend the articles linked from my citations above, as well as danah boyd’s small bookmark collection on Wikipedia.

When you’re filling out your Friendster profile, it says “Give other people a chance to find out how you’re unique,” and the second question in that list is “What’s your favorite television program?”

Although 2007 brought a great deal of change with the opening of Facebook to outside developers, its original components have stayed remarkably fixed for three years. Among these initial features are some based on what I will term the High Fidelity model of identity, after a passage in Nick Hornby’s novel in which Rob, his narrator, explains that “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” Few of us would admit to basing our social lives on this principle, but it doesn’t seem to have hindered Facebook and other social network sites.

The locus of the High Fidelity model on Facebook is a box on each profile with the bland and unhelpful title “Information.” The Information box holds two categories of, well, information: Contact Info and Personal Info. Oddly, sexual orientation and relationship status, the most personal info on the profile, don’t go under the Personal Info heading; they’re important enough to be trumpeted at the top of the page. The information listed in Personal Info is much more broadly social and contextual: activities and interests, as well as favorite music, TV shows, movies, books, and quotes. The most expressive element, a freeform “about me” space, comes last, appearing below the fold on the profile.

So Facebook doesn’t draw much attention to the most flexible portion of the profile, but it does draw attention to the lists of favorite things, which tend to visually dominate the Information box. Each favorite thing is a convenient link to a list of other users who share a love of that particular cultural phenomenon. From the perspective of interface design, these links appear to be a key feature of Facebook, an obvious way of finding others. In practice, however, they’re little used, and their value, which is based on the High Fidelity principle, is limited.

According to social network researchers Cliff Lampe, Nicole Ellison, and Charles Steinfield, users who list many favorite things have no more friends than those who list few. (Those who list none do have fewer friends, perhaps because they spend less time on Facebook generally.) This suggests that users don’t find each other on the site through shared cultural preferences. Indeed, the links may be present less for any particular purpose and more just because they can be; even birthdays are links on Facebook, though there’s little value in a list of others with the same birthday. (Birthday links also suggest, though, that features which seem useless if unobtrusive to some may be useful to others: believers in astrology and planners of joint birthday parties might disagree with my judgment against them.)

It turns out that social network sites, especially Facebook, are generally used to articulate existing friendships rather than to create new ones. (Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield have also done research on this point with regard to Facebook.) Lists of favorite things, though, originated in a world where users were trying to create new relationships, on dating websites like Match.com. The value of these lists on dating websites was clear: as Hornby wrote of a hypothetical questionnaire for prospective dates, “it was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made.” I suspect the effects of using such lists on dating websites are not entirely positive—there’s a reason why the questionnaire idea is somewhere between absurd and offensive in print, and we shouldn’t ignore that reaction just because computers are involved.

Friendster, originally designed as a more sophisticated dating site, brought these lists into the new world of social network sites in 2002. The role of lists of favorite things on social network sites is a lot less clear, though. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that “the other guys think the purpose of communication is to get information. We think the purpose of information is to get communication.” The information Facebook profiles provide can contribute to communication; in his webcomic xkcd, for instance, Randall Munroe depicts “looking up someone’s profile before introducing yourself so you know which of your favorite bands to mention.” In general, though, lists of favorite things contribute little to communication.

Their greatest role might instead be in identity formation. To the extent that these lists matter, it is because they allow users to present themselves to an audience, and perhaps more importantly to themselves, in terms of their tastes. Hugo Liu has studied this phenomenon in depth on MySpace, concluding that “the social network profile’s lists of interests might actually be more useful as an indicator of one’s aesthetics than as a factual declaration of interests.” Social network sites may not help us make friends, but they do provide us with new ways to express how we see ourselves.

Both High Fidelity quotations are from page 117 in the first Riverhead trade paperback edition, and probably in other Riverhead editions as well.