The Internet: Syllabus

Reference Information for Fall 2008

James Collier
Office: 433 Shanks
Hours: 11-12 T,H and by appointment
(O) 231-8340; (H) Please refer to the abridged syllabus
jim.collier@vt.edu
AOL IM: CollierVT

Course Description

In this capstone course our object of study involves both the promises — societies will evolve, economies will develop, democracies will flourish — and the perils — culture will crumble, privacy will vanish, power will prevail — associated with the Internet. We will investigate how our presuppositions regarding computer development and use, personal identity, creative and intellectual freedom, ubiquitous communication, and countercultural ideals affect, and are affected by, our uses of the Internet. Our investigations will yield a synthetic set of questions and problems posed to advance our understanding of the Internet. By analyzing these questions and problems, we will develop principles that will lend a critical basis for the reflective use of the Internet beyond the classroom.

Course Goals

• Articulate, through the process of refining questions and forming problems, our presuppositions and idealizations regarding the Internet;

• Document the Internet's presence in our daily lives;

• Develop our intuitions regarding the truth and fiction of the Internet's social influence;

• Examine the possible future of the Internet in relation to our personal and social concerns;

• Draft a set of principles to serve as a guide for future deliberations about Internet.

The Story of the Course

Narrative Arc

Every course tells a story. The opening of the story I will tell speaks to the assumptions, practices and goals guiding this class. However, your experience of a course — particularly of what you want to learn — is more than the sum of these parts. I ask you to consider the class not as a collection of atomized requirements and loosely related tasks. Rather, I want you to see how the class achieves meaning through the ways you learn. Consider, then, how you best learn ideas — through individual and collaborative work, through reading, through discussion, through writing, through commentary — carry them forward, and integrate them into your lives in, and beyond, the classroom.

"The Internet: Hype and Glory" is a capstone experience. As such we will incorporate, practice and examine what you have learned throughout the Professional Writing Program. In this course, a critical study of the Internet will provide an intellectual framework for the capstone experience.

Why the Internet? According to Wikipedia (are there any other sources?) — and momentarily accepting a tired media coinage — you are the Internet Generation, the iGeneration, also known as Generation Y or Z ("experts" seem to have a hard time defining you). The iGeneration "... has no recourse to a memory of (or nostalgia for) a pre-Internet history, a factor which greatly differentiates them from older generations." Moreover, you take " ... the Internet for granted as part of the 'natural order of things,' readily accepting the utility of services such as internet forums, email, Wikipedia, search engines, MySpace, imageboards and YouTube as part of its global cultural ecosystem." If Wikipedia faintly, but accurately, captures your experiences, numerous challenge-worthy claims follow. For example, the Internet, and the personal computer that accesses it, is the dominant technology of your generation. The Internet impacts particularly, and perhaps even more profoundly, the subset of the iGeneration that you represent — the percentage of Americans who hold (or are about to hold) college degrees. Provocatively, one might claim that the Internet more profoundly influences your thoughts, ideas, abilities to conceive, express and solve problems than any contemporaneous, competing technologies — books for example — or any contemporaneous, competing relationships. According to futurists and pundits, the Internet has achieved innumerable, disparate aims — rewiring your brain, emptying your soul, encouraging you to live life on an eternally connected, public stage, isolating you from civic life, giving you easy access to the sum of human knowledge, baffling you as to the organization of knowledge and information, making school and work more convenient, and generating new, endless demands from school and work. In this morass of Internet hype and glory, what is the real story? Or, at least, what questions can we properly ask and begin to answer?

In this course I assume that the Internet plays a vital, but generally unexamined, role in your lives. To begin charting the Internet's influences, I will use the course readings to take up themes and concepts related to the Internet — the evolution of increasingly networked personal computers, the redefinition of privacy and the pervasiveness of rumor online, the role of networked communities and communication in democracy, and the taming of the Internet to serve the interests of corporate and political power brokers. The questions you raise on the readings will be the basis of our discussions. These discussions will lend the intellectual framework for the course assignments.

    Writing

    The writing assignments in this course form a sequence. The sequence asks that you perform research initially, in the digital ethnography, and through the remainder of the semester pare down and synthesize knowledge you have gained. The goal of this assignment structure is not for you to develop a definitive account of the Internet, rather to have you refine the questions and problems you pose about the Internet now and in the future. By semester's end, I would like you to develop a tentative and revisable set of principles regarding, among other things, the Internet's use, censorship, access, promises, perils, hype, and glory.

    Question Formation and Analysis

    The purpose of the question formation and analysis assignment is five-fold: 1) To encourage you to analytically engage course texts; 2) To prepare a basis for class discussion; 3) To give you practice in refining questions and forming problems leading into the course assignments; 4) To have you develop and consider critical questions about the Internet beyond the course; 5) To lend a basis for synthesizing the ideas you explore in the course.

    Oral Presentations

    Why oral presentations in this course? First, and pragmatically, your future employers demand that speaking skills receive greater attention. Second, and theoretically, a trend in which I am a participant is to examine writing as influencing, and being influenced by, a constellation of communications practices. Internet use demands that we re-consider basic assumptions regarding our communications practices. For example, the ease with which one can use multiple, digital platforms and media challenges the practices and purposes of the preeminent mode of communication in English — writing. Writing, as readily augmented by other media and other voices, is a rather different technology than the one characterized by Socrates in the Phaedrus:

      Socrates: He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

      Phaedrus: That is most true.

      Socrates: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want t o know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. (emphasis mine)

    Perhaps more than any preceding technology, the Internet allows writers to more easily and fully become protective parents of their words and ideas. By emphasizing other forms and forums of communication, oral presentations for example, this course seeks to promote your understanding of writing in broader framework. And in so doing begin to remedy our Socratic hangover.

    Reading

    The reading requirements for the course are manageable — even, if I may dare say, reasonable. Certain days, however, demand a heavy reading load. All of you have developed strategies for dealing with the amount of reading required by courses. You have learned to skim, to read closely certain parts of a text, to review subheadings to get the sense of an argument — steps necessary for you to deal with the rising tide of information you encounter now and will encounter in the future. In fact, many of you may completely abandon the convoluted prose of your textbooks to locate relevant formulas or illustrations. We will discuss reading strategies further in class. But with respect to the course requirements, let me offer a brief guide:

      If you look at the class calendar you will see that I use three verbs in referring to preparation for a given class — 'read', 'review' and, occasionally,'consult'. Here, I am signaling an order of priority — what is designated to 'read' is of the greatest importance to that day's discussion; what is designated to 'review' is of less importance, and what is designated to 'consult' is helpful (especially with the writing assignments) but not required. Of course, if you closely read all that is assigned you will take away more from the course. But if you must make choices you can prioritize, and adopt reading strategies, according to the above guide.

    Wiki

    We will use a public wiki — also called The Internet: Hype and Glory —  for publishing and editing our work. Like Wikipedia, our wiki is public and can be edited by members who join it. As our wiki resides on Wetpaint, its public face is somewhat hidden. Wikis make online networking and interaction easy. In you work, then, I want you to consider and take advantage of making links to sources, embedding media and performing collaborative editing and authorship.

    Instant Messenger

    If you wish to chat, or desire a quick answer to a question when I am on-line, "CollierVT" is my ID.

    Tips

    In designing a course I consider how I would take it — aside from simply fulfilling requirements. Keeping in mind that we possess idiosyncratic learning styles, let me offer a few tips.

      Know What You Want: At the beginning of the semester honestly assess your strengths and weaknesses as a thinker and communicator within an academic framework. The course assignments are flexible enough to allow you work on what you need and what you find stimulating. Still, if you feel the course does not adequately address your personal and professional concerns, let me know. The assignments can be tailored to your needs and we can work together on any specific areas of writing and communication you desire.

      Keep Perspective: Consider the relative value of assignments. Do not spend an inordinate amount of time on, say, particular question formation and analysis assignments. Also, writing assignments can be revised until the last day of the semester. Get the most you can out of the course but keep your workload reasonable. The best advice I can give is to begin early on writing assignments, meet deadlines, and start the semester strong by making sure you take care of the question formation assignment.

      Consult With Me: I am available to you well beyond office hours. I keep regular hours in my office, but if you need me do not hesitate to call or e-mail to set up a time to meet. Also, you can contact me through AOL Instant Messenger when I am in my office. A brief personal point: I like being on-line — perhaps too much. To discipline myself and my writing life I have decided not to be on-line (at least as much) at home. Thus, for an immediate response to a query after 5 p.m. call me at home. I do answer e-mail promptly; still, if you send a message after 5 p.m. you will get a response from me the next morning.

      Have Fun: I know "fun" is not the first (or second) notion to leap to mind when you think of taking academic courses. However, this class may be one of the last opportunities you have to creatively and rigorously work on your writing and communication skills before your career begins in earnest. Try to work beyond the common wisdom and expectations you have developed to this point. A number of fascinating issues lie at the heart of this course — the influences of the Internet, changing conceptions of our selves and our work on-line, the possibilities to participate in profound, lasting social change. These issues, I believe, are fun insofar as they have direct bearing on our shared well-being. The joy, and fun, of this course lies is in the challenge, in the puzzlement, and in the work, of making meaning.

    If you have any questions at any time, please let me know.

A Few Words (and a poem) of Hype and Glory

    All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
    Richard Brautigan, 1967

    I'd like to think (and
    the sooner the better!)
    of a cybernetic meadow
    where mammals and computers
    live together in mutually
    programming harmony
    like pure water
    touching clear sky.

    I like to think
    (right now, please!)
    of a cybernetic forest
    filled with pines and electronics
    where deer stroll peacefully
    past computers
    as if they were flowers
    with spinning blossoms.

    I like to think
    (it has to be!)
    of a cybernetic ecology
    where we are free of our labors
    and joined back to nature,
    returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
    and all watched over
    by machines of loving grace.

    "I must confess that I've never trusted the Web. I've always seen it as a coward's tool. Where does it live? How do you hold it personally responsible? Can you put a distributed network of fiber-optic cable 'on notice'? And is it male or female? In other words, can I challenge it to a fight?"
    — Stephen Colbert

    "I have an almost religious zeal — not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up."
    — Dan Millman

    "The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, 'people without lives.' We don't care. We have each other."
    — Dave Berry

    "Internet: absolute communication, absolute isolation."
    — Paul Carvel

    "The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years."
    — Rupert Murdoch

    "Advances in computer technology and the Internet have changed the way America works, learns, and communicates. The Internet has become an integral part of America's economic, political, and social life."
    — Bill Clinton

    "The Internet is a shallow and unreliable electronic repository of dirty pictures, inaccurate rumors, bad spelling and worse grammar, inhabited largely by people with no demonstrable social skills."
    — Author Unknown

I've selected many of these quotes from a rather vast repository known as The Quote Garden.

Assignments

Writing Assignments and Presentations

Class Presence

"Eighty percent of success is showing up." — Woody Allen

    Woody Allen's words speak to a simple truth: A strong correlation exists between attending class (or attending anything else for that matter) and performing well. Our class is small. I need you in the room: I need your energy, your questions, and your insights. To that end, I will note your attendance. I will consider attendance, active participation in class discussions and in on-line forums in the following way:

    At the end of the semester, in determining final course grades, I will "help" students who have fully participated in the course. For example, a 'B+' will become an 'A-'. Students who participate roughly half the time, I will neither "hurt" nor "help." But students who neglect their obligations either entirely, or a great majority of the time, will not receive the benefit of the doubt. For example, a 'B' will become a 'B-'. If you have ANY questions about your standing in this area, I encourage you to consult me.

Grading Criteria

Question Formation and Analysis

For purposes of this assignment I have divided the class into two "teams" — Team Orange and Team Maroon. Your team designation gives me a way to organize the assignment. While you will work individually, the assignment leads to a collective outcome. Please refer to the course calendar to determine when you will pose questions or provide an analysis of questions.

I will grade the Question Formation and Analysis Assignment based on the number of assignments you perform and post to the wiki. Grades will be determined as follows:

    3 question sets and 3 analyses: A
    2 question sets and 3 analyses: A-
    3 question sets and 2 analyses: B+
    2 question sets and 2 analyses: B
    1 question set and 2 analyses: B-
    3 question sets and 1 analysis: C+
    2 question sets and 1 analysis: C
    1 question set and 1 analysis: C-

    As you can see in the above table, I have not accounted for all permutations, and their corresponding grades, for this assignment. However, you should be able to discern a clear pattern and the basis for my evaluations. If you perform the assignment in a way that does not correspond to the above table, I will use my judgment in determining the grade. If you have any questions about your standing regarding this assignment, do not hesitate to ask me.

For university grading criteria, please consult "Grades, Grade Points, and Credit Hours" in the Undergraduate Course Catalog.

I grade using a 100-point scale. For assignments receiving letter grades, the following conversion applies:

    A = 100
    A- = 92
    B+ = 88
    B = 85
    B- = 82
    C+ = 78
    C = 75
    C- = 72
    D+ = 68
    D = 65
    D- = 62
    F = 50

For final grades, the following scale applies:

    A = 93.5-100
    A- = 90-93.49
    B+ = 86.5 - 89.9
    B = 83.5-86.49
    B- = 80-83.49
    C+ = 76.5 - 79.9
    C = 73.5-76.49
    C- = 70-73.49
    D+ = 66.5 - 69.9
    D = 63.5-66.49
    D- = 60-63.49
    F = Below 60

Let me offer a broad sensibility as to how I judge formal writing. Please know that I consider these criteria within the context of the curriculum, course development, my performance, your performance, and assignment design:

A paper

The overall presentation shows a high level of understanding and perspective. Well-conceived and descriptive. A clear understanding of the audience. The work's purpose and objectives are clearly and convincingly stated. Concise background material clearly sets the context, frames, and introduces the subject. Arguments and themes are logically stated and organized and support the overall objective. Evidence and descriptions are objectively stated and separated from interpretations. Content is detailed and suggestive. Conclusions are persuasive and well-supported by the evidence. The prose is easy to read and exhibits a defined sense of unity and purpose. The writing, then, "hangs together." Includes topic, paragraph, and sentence transitions, and contains no major and few minor grammatical or technical errors. Other media, when used, are highly informative, well-designed, and easy to interpret.

A- Generally means you meet all criteria for an 'A' except presentation and problems with one or two criteria. Audience and purpose may be clear, for instance, but you failed to develop fully a central idea.

B paper

The writing presents content clearly and displays a firm grasp of the material but without as much focus and perspective as an 'A' paper. Successful effort is evident throughout the paper. Inconsistencies in identifying audience. The work's purpose and objectives may be somewhat ill-defined. Background material sets the context, frames, and introduces the subject. While well-written and adequately detailed, some sections may lack complete development and coherence. Unevenness in presentation and content. No major grammatical errors; some minor grammatical errors but none that disrupt an easy reading of the paper. Other media are informative, intelligible and support the content of the paper.

B+ Exceeds the criteria for a 'B' in one or more areas. For example, the purpose of the paper may possess greater clarity. Audience is clearly identified and the contexts governing the explanation and interpretation of the information are well-detailed. Greater consistency in execution than a 'B'; better paragraph development and coherence among sentences, for example.

B- A lack of connection among, for example, audience and purpose. A number of presentation errors affect the meaning of the sentences or structure of the text. A somewhat stronger relationship among the elements of the paper — audience, purpose, content, style — than a "C" paper. Still, the paper lacks full development of ideas and demonstrates some problems weaving together a complete understanding of the content with a clearly identified audience, purpose, and context.

C paper

Displays a reasonable grasp of the content but little original thought. The purpose of the work is inconsistently presented. The audience cannot be clearly identified. While understandable, the purpose and objective are not presented in relationship to the context set in the opening. Treatment of the topic is general. Lapses exist in coherence, organization, and development. Contains errors in presenting the evidence and the argument. Evidence marginally supports the conclusion. Some major grammatical errors and frequent minor grammatical errors. The paper is difficult to read and lacks flow. Media do not support content objectives.

C+ Exceeds the criteria for a 'C' in one or more areas. Perhaps more imagination in thought and explanation. Greater consistency in determining audience, purpose and objective. Fewer errors in technical content and somewhat greater coherence in the presentation and the conclusion. Fewer grammatical and cosmetic errors. Easier read than the 'C' paper.

C- The elements of the paper — audience, purpose, content, style — are unclear and appear unrelated. For example, a final report about a weapons controversy may deal with a number of different systems in only a cursory way. No explanations are given about how the topics of the paper lead to one another. Presentation errors suggest no revision.

D (of any variety) or F paper

I will ask you revise 'D' or 'F' papers until you receive, minimally, a 'C-'. You have the choice of whether or not to revise. If you choose not to revise, you will receive a failing grade.

Revision Policy

You may revise any writing assignment, except the Question Formation and Analysis Assignment, as many times as you wish during the semester. I will average the grade on the revision(s) with the original grade. I will take revisions until the final week of the semester.

Texts

Texts are listed in their order appearance in the course:

Honor System

This course follows university policies pertaining to academic honesty and plagiarism. If you any have questions please ask me, or consult the Undergraduate Honor System web site.