Department of Communication Studies Concordia University, Montreal 3 credit hours monday 1:15 pm - 4:00 pm Professor Mary Flanagan | mary@maryflanagan.com http://www.maryflanagan.com/courses/355winter01.htm

--Click HERE to acquire the printer-friendly PDF version of the syllabus, complete with color graphics!
~Kazam!
--The Online Component of the course is located HERE--
turn in your assignments at this site in the Communication --> Discussion area! Look for your group.

--Don't Know or Forgot How to use WebCT? Instructions are located HERE.

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In this course, students will explore issues relating to culture, communications, and technology.
Cybertechnologies have created new contexts for understanding culture, and in fact have helped
generated a new definition of culture called technoculture or cyberculture. As Teresa de Lauretis
claims, technology "shapes our perception and cognitive processes, mediates our relationships
with objects of the material and physical world, and our relationships with our own or other bodies."
The human/machine interface becomes a place where traditional notions of subjectivity and
embodiment are potentially abandoned--as such it becomes a rich area for intervention and investigation.

This course will explore technology's interaction with communications media and cultural artifacts--
debates such as fiction vs. reality, cybersex and virtual sexuality vs the physical body, will be
complicated through a selection of readings and electronic media works. Each class will focus
on readings and fiction pertaining to current or historical "cyberthought." Important issues
such as the creation of art in a technological context, the representation of the body in a
virtual space, and virtual architecture will be critically examined. Ideas such as avatar development
and multi-user virtual environments, critical analyses of technology, social meaning of technological
tools, futurism, technology and the body, science fiction, and the construction of community via
technology will be explored. The course will draw from many media forms and will include
screenings of most kinds of media, from film to videos, multimedia presentations, internet sites,
and CDROM.

Each week a group of students will lead the discussion, and a one page written summary of the reading
will be required from each student to be critiqued in study groups. In addition, there will be one group
project, a midterm exam, and a final paper.

Note: * Previous familiarity of Bladerunner and reading
of William Gibson's Neuromancer is recommended, since many articles refer to these works.

The course will utilize articles and chapters available online or in the learning center.

Class Organization, Assignments, Objectives:    

Each week a small panel of students will lead the discussion, and a one page written summary of the reading will be required from each student to be critiqued in study groups. In addition, there will be one group project, a midterm exam, and a final paper.

 

Assignments & Grade Breakdown:

Grades.
The grade will be based on class participation, readings and reading summaries, attendance, the group projects, the mid term exam, and the final paper. Attendance is mandatory. All take home written exercises must be typed. Because of the size of the class and the types of assignments, no late assignments can be accepted.

 

Assignments.

10%   Group Project: Bodies

Manipulating text, graphics, interactivity, audio; writing fiction, dialogue, or conducting suveys; using paper, still graphics, the web, live performance, installation, or video-- the exercises are your chance to experimentally explore some of the concepts related to the area of the body and technology. You could choose to do a performance about gender stereotyping in chat rooms, create a short animation depicting future notions of the body, or make a video in which cyberpunk fiction gender roles are reversed. It’s open. This exercise is meant to be a fun and provocative project in which you engage the ideas discussed.

20%   MidTerm Exam

The MidTerm exam is a short answer and essay exam.

20%   Participation and Group Presentations

Every week a team of students will lead and participate in the week’s discussion, and attend class for the duration of the session unless previously excused. If it is your group’s turn to present, you may decide upon any presentation style you wish. For an “A” in participation, groups should bring additional media or other materials to their discussions or present their ideas in innovative ways (performance? Artwork? for example, one year students created a short performance piece based on ideas from the readings).  Students work in groups of 4-5 and present once a semester.

25%   Reading Summaries and Group Critiques

Every week students will hand in reading summaries of approximately one page of text, or about 450 - 500 words. These essays are due in our online course forum at the beginning of the relevant seminar - no late summaries will be accepted. Students will also read each other’s summaries in groups and comment upon each other’'

25%   Final Paper

A final paper is due in class April 9 and a short summary (abstract) will be presented to the class.  NO LATE PAPERS WILL BE ACCEPTED. Papers should be 10-12 pages long, and should examine some aspect of the course is greater detail. For example, the paper could examine some aspect of community on the Internet cyberculture -perhaps the gendered features of such rhetoric; etc.  Students may choose the topic of their final paper, but the paper must be word processed, double spaced, and must include ideas/readings from class. Papers must also include appropriate citations/footnotes/ endnotes/ bibliography/ works cited information. Font size 10 – 12 point only. Please use MLA, APA, or the Chicago style, note on the cover of the paper which style you are using, and use the style correctly. See your instructor if you need help finding information on styles. Proper use of style, as well as punctuation, spelling, etc is important and will weigh in the overall grade. Papers must make use of materials not covered in class (in other words, students are expected to do research) and must use scholarly sources (such as journal articles). No extensions of this deadline will be given (with the exception of a documented medical emergency).

Upon successful completion of the course, each student will have demonstrated:

Course Policies:

Attendance:

Attendance is MANDATORY. Attendance is taken in the first 10 minutes of class, and those not present are marked absent for the class unless prior arrangement has been made. You are allowed a grace of two absences. After 2 absences you will lose a fraction of a letter grade off of your entire course grade at the end of the term for each additional absence (for example, an A student with 4 absences would receive a B+[A-, B+].

Work:

All written work created for the class must by typed. All of the work you do in class must be original work, ie your own, and cannot be used to fulfill the requirements in another course unless proposed in writing and worked out in advance with the instructors.

Note: You must have an email account (and with that, you get server space with concordia) for this course. Go to CC 207 or H-925 with your id, get the account, and along with this you will get 5MB of space for your personal home page. FYI The URL of your site will be http://alcor.concordia.ca/~your_userid/ . Name the root index.html.
You will ftp to: alcor.concordia.ca/~username

IP address is: 132.205.7.51

Late Assignments:

Except in circumstances pre-approved by the instructor, late assignments drop an entire grade per day late, with failure at 5 days. I will not accept projects/papers later than 5 days. IF YOU ARE GOING TO MISS THE EXAM, YOU MUST MAKE PRIOR ARRANGEMENTS AND NOTIFY THE PROFESSOR IN WRITING AT LEAST 2 DAYS BEFORE THE EXAM DATE.

If you have a disability (physical, learning, or psychological) which may make it difficult for you to carry out the coursework as outlined, and/or requires accommodations such as recruiting note takers, readers, or extended time on exams and assignments, please contact the instructor during the first two weeks of class to develop a solution for the situation. If you do not contact the instructor you are required to complete the work in the syllabus on time.

Recommended texts for further reading:

Fiction: Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott; Software, Wetware, Freeware- book series by Rudy Rucker; Women of Wonder I & II, ed. by Pamela Sargent; MirrorShades, Crystal Express, Heavy Weather, Schismatrix,  Islands  in the Net, Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, and anything else by Bruce Sterling; Crash Course by Wilhelmina Baird; Snow Crash,& The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson; Kindred, The Parable of the Sower, and Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler; Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero, Virtual Light by William Gibson; The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling; Virtual Girl by Amy Thompson; My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by M. Leyner; Solaris by Stanislaw Lem; Time & Light by William Bornefeld, The Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs; Synners by Pat Cadigan; anything by James Tiptree; Ann McCaffrey, The Ship Who Sang;

Critical: The Gendered Cyborg, ed. By Gill Kirkup, Linda James, Kath Woodward, and Fiona Hovenden; The Cyborg Handbook, ed. by Chris Hables Gray; Technologies of the Gendered Body by Anne Balsamo; Wired Women ed. by Lynn Cheny and Elizabeth Weise;  Postmodern Currents, by Margot Lovejoy; Digital Delerium, by Arthur & Marilouise Kroker; Storming the Reality Studio, by McCaffrey; Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, ed. Terry, J. and Calvert.

Journals/Mags: 21C, ctheory, SEMIOTEXT(E), Postmodern Culture; Leonardo; ArtByte

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Week 1: Monday, January 8 2001
"New" Technologies and Communications Media: An Introduction

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick), 1968. VMR Film Library

Week 2: Monday, January 15 2001
Cyberculture: Premonitions

Thinking about New technologies and communications media…

Metropolis (Fritz Lang), 1927 , 90 min.