What are media effects? Do the media influence our attitudes, opinions, and even actions? Or are we active agents who interpret media content on our own terms and based on our existing knowledge and cultural background? How do new media technologies intersect with media effects and with society, in general? Join Jen Schradie, PhD student in the Department of Sociology, to discuss these issues in the context of Elihu Katz's "Lazarsfeld’s Map of Media Effects” and the preface to the 2010 edition of Manuel Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society.

Dilan Mahendran will discuss his dissertation work on race and computation. Dilan is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley's School of Information and a BCNM DE student. His academic areas of interest lie in Race Critical Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Philosophy of Technology, Philosophical Anthropology, and Phenomenology. He is also interested in the methodological problems of positivism and naturalism in technology studies and issues of constructivism in the social study of science and technology. We'll read Dilan's dissertation abstract, sections 1-7 of Edmund Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences, (optionally) Husserl's Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, and (optionally) Heidegger's The Thing.

Ryan Shaw will offer a conveniently condensed portion of his iSchool 190 course on Web Architecture and Information Management. That course focuses on understanding the Web as an information system, and how to use it for information management for personal and shared information. The Web is an open and constantly evolving system which can make it hard to understand it holistically. This session will provide an overview of the Web as a whole, and how its individual parts fit together.

DiSalvo has worked at the intersection of design, technology and politics since 2000. From 2000 – 2005 he was a member of the tactical media collective Carbon Defense League, which engaged in designing software for activists, hacking electronics and information systems, and orchestrating oppositional media events to prompt public debate. In 2006 he received a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. From 2006 – 2007 he was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University with joint appointments in the Studio for Creative Inquiry and the Center for the Arts in Society, where he conducted scholarly and applied research into the use of robotics and sensing technologies in community contexts. In 2006 he also co-founded DeepLocal, a software and design consultancy that provides information design and location-based services to advocacy, journalism and municipal organizations. Since 2007 he has been an assistant professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

We'll read two recent articles by DiSalvo, "Design and the Construction of Publics" and "Nourishing the Ground for Sustainable HCI: Considerations from Ecologically Engaged Art". Both pieces frame a discussion of contemporary design and art, "particularly as they relate to how 'speculative practices' might contribute to new forms of public engagement with and understanding of technology."

We'll discuss selections from McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and three chapters from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Wark is Chair of Culture and Media at the Eugene Lang College of The New School and part of The New School for Social Research. In A Hacker Manifesto, Wark wields both Deleuze and Debord in relation to the issues of property, production, and information commodification in our era of globalized digital media. Championing the rise of a new hacker class, Wark takes on by now well-rehearsed debates over intellectual property and digital divides using Debord's aphoristic, French Marxist style.

For the last thirty years, Paul Virilio has been at the forefront of thinking through the connections between such seemingly disparate forces as optics, warfare, information, media, architecture, and the science of speed, or what he refers to as 'dromology'. This week's reading looks to chart two separate but interrelated vectors in relation to his thought. The first is the transformation in his work over the twenty-plus years that separate the publication of his seminal Speed and Politics and the later The Information Bomb. Simply put, our aim here will be to see how the prescience often cited in the earlier work has matured and transformed in the later work. The second question we'll consider is the extent to which Virilio's observations on New Media from a pre-crash, pre-9/11 era dominated by Dolly the sheep and JenniCam hold up a decade later.

We will discuss two selections from Arthur and Marilouise Kroker's Critical Digital Studies: Eugene Thacker's essay "Biophilosophy for the 21st Century," in which he looks at how the interfacing of biology with computers has transformed the concept of life itself, and Thierry Bardini's "Hypervirus: A Clinical Report" to consider how the virus, as a central being/trope in our digital future, operates beyond the biological and computational into realms of the social, cultural, and political.

We will discuss the introduction and prefaces from Alan Liu's The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (2004), an ambitious examination of our contemporary "information culture" that tries to articulate what role the humanities have to play in that culture.

We will discuss selections from Brian Massumi’s latest book, Parables for the Virtual, where he considers virtuality as it relates to movement. Paying particular attention to "The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image" and Massumi’s description of virtual affect in relation to Ronald Reagan’s account of watching himself move on television, we will discuss virtualities of movement.

We will discuss one essay about the very early days of radio (Denis Hollier, "The Death of Paper: A Radio Play"), and one essay about the cultural impact of mp3 technology (Jonathan Sterne, "The mp3 as Cultural Artifact"). Among other issues, we might want to consider the different temporal and ontological modes that distinguish radio and mp3 podcasting, the changing structure of address available to each medium, the shifting terrain of copyright concerns in the move from radio broadcasting to file sharing, and how an emphasis on sound might reconfigure some of the basic assumptions in the often visually dominated field of new media studies.

Discuss "Border Hacks: Electronic Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Immigration", an excerpt of Rita Raley's book Reading Code. Optional further readings include Raley's "Code.surface || Code.depth,", "Machine Translation and Global English"and "Reveal Codes: Hypertext & Performance".

Discuss Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever, a lecture delivered on June 5, 1994, at the Freud Museum in London. We will look closely at the unnamed introduction, "Exergue," and "Preamble" (pages 1-31), paying special attention to Derrida's meditations on the psychical archive's relation to memory and the death drive, on the future of psychoanalytic inscription and historiography in light of electronic media, and on the filiation of digital archives.

Discuss selected readings [1,2] in preparation for the "Second Lives: Reading and Writing Virtual Worlds" Media and Literature session at the 2008 MLA convention in San Francisco.

Discuss chapter 3 of Matthew Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms (MIT Press, 2008). "'An Old House with Many Rooms': The Textual Forensics of Mystery_House.dsk" is an investigation of a floppy disk containing the 1980 Apple II game Mystery House.

Discuss Rebecca Tushnet's Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity in conjunction with the BCNM Takeovers & Makeovers symposium being held on November 7-8.

Visit the Stanford Humanities Lab (SHL) and Green Library to speak with Henry Lowood, Stanford’s Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections. Of particular interest is his recent work on game preservation:

• Game Capture: The Machinima Archive and the History of Digital Games
• How They Got Game
• Preserving Virtual Worlds

Discuss selections from Abigail De Kosnik’s "Performing Transnational Anti-Fandom: Filipinos Protesting The Daily Show and Desperate Housewives Online."

Discuss the last chapter from Lisa Nakamura's most recent book, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (2008), entitled "Measuring Race on the Internet: Users, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the United States."