Cybercultures: Theory

Spring, 2007

Kristin Scott, MFA, A.M.

Department of Liberal Education

Columbia College Chicago

Kristin Scott:

Office: 623 S. Wabash, Suite 307

Phone: 312-344-7647

Email:

Class Blog Website: http://cybercultures.edublogs.org/

Office Hours: by appointment

Course Description and Rationale: This seminar course explores cyberspace, the most powerful and frequently inhabited site within contemporary culture. Students will explore specific themes such as, identity, community, bodies, virtuality, and sexuality through the lens of post-structuralist, postmodern, cyberfeminist, cyborg, and digital culture theories. Readings, discussions, research, writing, and a cyber-research project will help students gain a greater understanding of cyberspace, its culture, and the relationships that exist between machines and humans, as well as those between society and technology.

Course Objectives: the overall goal of this course is to give students the critical and analytical tools with which to examine, discuss, and understand the ways in which the internet both informs and reflects culture. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

Prerequisites:

English Composition II (52-1152) AND Introduction to Cultural Studies (46-1100)

Cultural Studies credit: This course is a level three cultural studies seminar.

Required Texts:

• The Cybercultures Reader, David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy eds. (Routledge, 2000)
• Other readings assigned (available online through class website or as handouts)

Course Calendar:

This calendar is subject to change. Additional and/or substitute homework may be assigned at the discretion of the instructor.

Legend:

CR: Cybercultures Reader

Week 1: Introduction to Course

• Where is cyberspace? Discussion.

• Introduction to basic Cyberspace terminology, cultural images, hypertexts and references.

Assigned readings:

• Michael Benedikt, “Cyberspace: First Steps” (CR 29)
• Arturo Escobar, “Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture” (CR 56)

UNIT I: Assessing the “Real” in Virtual Reality

Week 2: The “Real” in Virtual Reality: Has cyberspace brought us any closer to defining the “real” by providing its virtual opposite? Or are we attempting to gain access to the Platonic ideal world by replacing our physical and sensory reality with digital and software substitutes?

Assigned readings:

• Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations” from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184 (online: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-simulacra-and-simulations.html)
• Kevin Robins, “Cyberspace and the World We Live In” (CR 77)
• Excerpt from “Erontic Ontology of Cyberspace” by Michael Heim (online on class website)

Week 3: The Collision of Two Worlds: Is it possible for the virtual world to seem too real? Or for virtual reality to take precedence over reality? And what happens when these two worlds collide or the boundaries between the two are blurred?

Assigned readings:

• Steve Jones, “Reality© and Virtual Reality©: When Virtual and Real Worlds Collide” (handout).
• John Murphy, “There is Nothing Virtual about Virtual Reality” (handout).
• Choe Sang-Hun, “Hooked on the virtual world: A reality in South Korea” (online: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/11/business/addside12.php)

Film Screening: Synthetic Pleasures (Documentary investigates the influence of cutting-edge technology on our contemporary culture, asserting that a new artificial reality is emerging. Virtual reality, biotechnology, plastic surgery and mood-altering drugs promise seemingly unlimited powers to our bodies and our selves.)

Week 4: Virtual Selves? For centuries, the concept of “self” has provided fodder for much analysis and discussion. How then do we begin to consider our selves and our bodies in the more complicated context of a virtual environment?

Assigned readings:

• Anne Balsamo, “The Virtual Body in Cyberspace” (CR 489)
• Allucquère Rosanne Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures,” (CR 504)
• “The Electronic Disturbance: Critical Art Ensemble,” originally published by Autonomedia (part 4 of 7); includes “Case 43” from the Notebooks of Jacques Lacan (online: http://www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/autonomd/sp000913.txt)

UNIT II: (Re) Constructing Identities

Week 5: Identity and Cyberspace Subject(ivity):  Identity, we often learn, is subject to interpretation by the viewer (both contextually and visually). Yet online, can we really modify our own identities to project another desired identity to others? Or is our communication in some way engendered or racially or ethnically-oriented?

      Essay #1 DUE

Assigned readings:

• Turkle, Sherry. “Who Am We?” Wired, Issue 4.01, Jan 1996 (online: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/turkle.html)
• Turkle, Sherry. “Identity Crisis,” Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York: Touchstone, 1995 (handout).
• Diana Gromala, “Pain and Subjectivity in Virtual Reality,” (CR 598).

Week 6: Avatars & Cyborgs: In what ways are avatars and cyborgs social and biopolitical constructions that enable us to further explore and embody the “selves” we do not typically engender?  

Assigned readings:

• Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," (CR 291)
• “Avatar Psychotherapy” John Suler's The Psychology of Cyberspace (online: http://www.rider.edu/suler/psycyber/avatarther.html)
• Jennifer González, “Envisioning Cyborg Bodies” (CR 540)

Week 7: Cyberspace Representations of the Body: What effects have the postmodern dissolution of the subject and the advent of our technological ability to “flee” from the physical had on our relationships to and perceptions of our bodies while in cyberspace?

Assigned readings:

• Gloria Mark, “Flying Through Walls and Virtual Drunkenness: Disembodiment in Cyberspace?” (online: http://duplox.wz-berlin.de/docs/panel/gloria.html)
• Deborah Lupton, “The Embodied Computer/User” (CR 477)
• Marjorie Worthington, “Bodies That Natter: Virtual Translations and Transmissions of the Physical” (handout)

UNIT III: Breaking Boundaries, but in WhoseSpace.com?

Week 8: CyberCommunities: How do we (re)construct our external models of community in cyberspace? Is internet technology really enabling a “world wide community,” wherein humans feel more connected to one another, or is cyberspace isolating us from one another more than ever before? 

Assigned readings:

·         Ananda Mitra, “Virtual Commonality: Looking for India on the Net” (CR 676)

·         Michele Willson, “Community in the Abstract: A Political and Ethical Dilemma?” (CR 644).

·         Howard Rheingold, from The Virtual Community: Introduction (online: http://www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbookintro.html)

·         Julian Dibbell, “The Unreal Estate Boom,” Wired, Jan. 2003 (online: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/gaming_pr.html)

Week 9: Ethnicity and Race in Cyberspace: In what ways is race and ethnicity encoded or performed online? And does the lack of regulations in cyberspace support the interpellation and cohesiveness of subversive and discriminatory groups?

Assigned readings:

• Lisa Nakamura, "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet" (CR p. 712)
• Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, “Racialized Fantasies on the Internet,” Signs, Vol. 24, No. 4, Summer 1999 (handout).
• Susan Zickmund, “Approaching the Radical Other: the Discursive Culture of Cyberhate,” (CR 237)

Week 10: Cybersubcultures: What exactly are cybersubcultures? Is there even a dominant cyberspace culture/s? And if so, in what ways are online subcultures resistant to the dominant cyberculture/s?  

       Essay #2 DUE

Assigned readings:

• Susan Clerc, “Estrogen Brigades and Big Tits’ Threads: Media Fandom On-Line and Off” (CR 216)
• Andrew Ross, “Hacking Away at the Counter-Culture,” (CR 254).

Week 11: Cybercolonialization and Cultural Domination: Does cyberspace break down and disrupt all social, cultural and geographical hierarchies, or is this global frontier the newest manifestation of nationalized boundaries and colonization?

Assigned readings:

• Graham Barwell and Kate Bowles, “Border Crossings: The Internet and the Dislocation of Citizenship” (CR 702)
• Jon Stratton, “Cyberspace and the Globalization of Culture,” (CR 721).
• Ziauddin Sardar, “Alt.Civilizations.Faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West,” (CR 732).

UNIT IV: CyberSexuality and Gender Politics

Week 12: The CyberSexual: How is sexuality embodied and performed in cyberspace, particularly by those inhibited within their culture/s? What impact will computer-mediated sexual relationships have on face-to-face relationships, as the capacity for virtual cybersex becomes more technologically advanced and prevalent?

Assigned readings:

• Garet Branwyn, “Compu-Sex: Erotica for Cybernauts” (CR p. 396).
• Randall Woodland, “Queer Spaces, Modem Boys and Pagan Statues: Gay Lesbian Identity and the Construction of Cyberspace,” (CR 416)
• Susan Stryker, “Transsexuality: The Postmodern Body And/As Technology,” (CR 588).
• Bonnie Ruberg, “Cyberporn Sells in Virtual World,” Wired, 12.19.05 (online: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,69878-0.html)

Cyber-Research Project Presentations

Week 13: Virtual Spaces and Dangerous Places: Anonymity and the ability to don other bodies in cyberspace allow for uninhibited fantasy role-playing; but in what ways can our psyches be abused and our virtual bodies violated?

Assigned readings:

• Shannon McRae, “Coming Apart at the Seams: Sex, Text and the Virtual Body,” (online: http://www.fragment.nl/mirror/McRae/vseams.htm)
• Dibbell, Julian. "A Rape in Cyberspace" (online: http://www.ludd.luth.se/mud/aber/articles/village_voice.html)
• Allucquere Rosanne Stone, “Violation and Virtuality: Two cases of physical and psychological boundary transgression and their implications,” (online: http://gender.eserver.org/violation-and-virtuality.txt)

Cyber-Research Project Presentations

Week 14: Negotiating Gender in Cyberspace & CyberFeminism: A new version of feminism has emerged; but are these cyberfeminists attempting to transcend what they have perceived to be the sociopolitical limitations of their bodies? Or are women now (re)constructing new identities on the internet?

Assigned readings:

A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21^st Century

• Judith Squires, “Fabulous Feminist Futures and the Lure of Cyberculture” (CR 360) 
• Sadie Plant, “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations” (CR 429). 
• Susan Luckman, “(En)Gendering the Digital Body: Feminism and the Internet” (handout)

Cyber-Research Project Presentations

Week 15: Summary of Semester

Cyber-Research Project Presentations

Grades and Course Requirements:

Grade Scale:

Grade Distribution:

Online Responses – 25%

Paper Essay #1 – 25%

Paper Essay #2 – 25%

Ethnography Project & Presentation – 25%

Online Responses:

Regularly throughout the semester, students will be required to post a response/s to readings, discussions, and/or questions posed by the instructor in an online discussion forum. When assigned, students are responsible for posting an online commentary/response to their readings and engage with one another on the discussion board. Emphasis will be placed on quality of writing (over quantity) and one’s ability to contextualize readings (making responses relevant to the broader concepts being studied).

Paper Essays:

Students are required to write two (2) critical paper essays, a minimum of 5-6 pages in length, in response to topics that will be provided approximately three weeks prior to the date each is due. Papers will be graded based on approach to and engagement with given topic, the utilization of critical and cultural analyses, and demonstrated ability to clearly and convincingly articulate argument.

Cyber-Research Project & Presentation:

In an effort to encourage and give opportunities for students to practice their theoretical investigations into Cyberculture, each student will engage in a cyber-research project (which will be discussed at length when assignments are made). Each student will also be responsible for presenting her/his project to the class.

Notes:

• All writing for this course (on paper) must be composed using a standard, 12-point font size, and with standard 1” margins.
• I will only accept email attachments of your paper if you will be absent the day the paper is due; but the paper MUST be received by the beginning of class on the day it is due. It is YOUR responsibility to make sure I received the paper on time.
• The Writing Center is for all students at all levels of writing. The type of consultation the center offers is simply a standard part of any successful writing process. You can use the center by making an appointment over the phone or drop in on the hour. You may also elect to sign up for a weekly hour-long session, at a time of your choosing to meet with the same consultant.

Participation:

Attendance is required – both physically and mentally. You are expected to take an active role in class discussions and online. Also, please make sure your phone is off or on buzz (and buried deep inside your backpack), so it’s not heard while in class.

Attendance:

You are allowed only two absences during the semester, though each time you are absent, you miss a lot of in-class discussion that may affect your overall performance. Furthermore, if you are absent from class, you are responsible for making sure that you have all the information you need (so exchange information with another student in the class). Also note that for each time you come to class ten minutes late or more OR leave ten minutes or more early, you will be charged with a ½ absence. Only two such instances of being tardy or leaving early will quickly result in one full absence!

Academic Integrity:

The Columbia College Chicago Catalogue states that "The College prohibits the following conduct: all forms of academic dishonesty, including cheating; plagiarism; knowingly furnishing false information to the College; forgery; alteration or fraudulent use of College documents, instruments, or identification."  If you misrepresent another's ideas and/or written work as your own, then you will earn an "F" for the course. Academic dishonesty is not worth the penalty it incurs, so don’t do it!