Things to Include in US 201

• Several Classic Texts:
  • Bush: "As We May Think"
  • Licklider: "Man-Computer Symbiosis"
• Moore's Law

  What is Moore's Law? (from Intel)
  Making Use of Moore's Law
  The Underside of Moore's Law (Howard Rheingold)
  Introduction from Unleashing the Killer App: digital strategies for market dominance (Larry Downes and Chunka Mui) [see for Metcalfe's Law]
  An Update on Moore's Law (Moore on Moore)

• the concept of User Interface
  • and icons... cf. Neal Stephenson In the Beginning Was the Command Line, and Arnett's Counter-rant
• Syndromes

  ...things 'everybody' seems to be doing, like thinking that everything is somehow available on the Web. A listserv posting to STS-L describes "WWW Syndrome of Research" as being akin to "the 1967 Syndrome", in which users of a CD-ROM index to Water Resources Abstracts just didn't use anything older than 1967, when the CD-ROM started... the information was essentially 'lost'.

• Internet History (History about something so very recent?)

  my own Chronology, or bits of it anyhow

  and Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive project

  and The Dead Media Project, for some perspective (see griffin for source)

  Danny Hillis on remembering and forgetting

• HyperText as a new medium

  Explore The Electronic Labyrinth's version of the history of hypertext

  and look at our holdings of books in the area

• CyberSpace: where the concept came from, how it spread

  some definitions from The Hacker's Dictionary

  Landow's Overview and Marshall McLuhan Meets William Gibson in "Cyberspace" (Michael E. Doherty)

  steersman/control/homeostasis: Weiner, Ashby, feedback... but from what bits of early-1980s lexical space did William Gibson assemble 'cyberspace'?

  "An imaginary locus of interaction created by communal agreement" (Stone, in Benedikt Cyberspace : first steps pg 84)

  'cyberspace' search in Annie (to give an idea of the variety)

• Web Pages as Personal Space (cf John Seabrook in The New Yorker 16 Oct 1995)

  ...and how the Web has changed how we work. See Web Developer's Virtual Library, Scout Report Signpost, among others

• "Technology will change the way we perceive the world": Interval Research Corporation
• Just what is "The Information Age", and where did the phrase originate? See onlineinc.com ("Your Guide to the Information Age")
• The Bar Code as Metaphor for the Age (cf Brown's Revolution at the Checkout Counter)
• Bloatware
• Hackers: bane or blessing? (cf Steven Levy's Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution, from another era...)

  "marginal subcultures" --Chesher

• Invisible Worlds (invisible.net): CyberGeography Research, and their mappa.mundi.net subunit
• Consciousness and AI: Kurzweil and Searle and so on
• Peer-to-Peer: MP3 and other developments (see Atlantic's Technology/Digital Culture, search for 'MP3')
• A Communication Technology

  Welcome to the Laser Decade (Paul Saffo)

• Object-Oriented
• Bandwidth
• Neural Nets

  Another Formula for Intelligence: The Neural Net Paradigm (Ray Kurzweil), and Kevin Gurney's course material

• Virtual Reality

  Colonizing Virtual Reality: Construction of the Discourse of Virtual Reality, 1984-1992 (Chris Chesher)

• "Computer Literacy"

  Computers are especially ungainly devices, so manufacturers count on users to meet their incomplete inventions more than halfway. The happy captives are said to be computer literate --tame and tractable, and expert at making up for the manufacturers' design failings. (Paul Saffo, in Terry Winograd's Bringing Design to Software, 1996:89-90)