Technology and Society Are Unthinkable Without Each Other — Each Provides the Means and Framework in Which the Other Develops

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An Information Technology & Society Certiﬁcate Program Requirement

hiremelive.com RISK, REGULATION, INNOVATION, ETHICS, POLITICS ... Technological questions are social as well. This course investigates the social and historical contexts of technological change, and the ways in which technologies impact society.

Technology and society are unthinkable without each other — each provides the means and framework in which the other develops. To explore this dynamic, this course investigates a wide array of questions on the interaction between technology, society, politics, and economics, emphasizing the themes of innovation and maturation, systems and regulation, risk and failure, and ethics and expertise. Speciﬁc topics covered include nuclear power and disasters, green energy, the development and regulation of the Internet, medical expertise and controversy, intellectual property, the ﬁnancial crisis, and the electric power grid.

TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS 11-11:50AM IN MCCORMICK 101 Prof. Janet Vertesi PRECEPTS ON THURSDAY AFTERNOONS & FRIDAY MORNINGS Sociology Department Wallace Hall Rm 122 WITH ALEX BOLFRASS (POLITICS) & CLARK BERNIER (SOCIOLOGY) [email protected] 609-258-8724

[1] PARTICIPATION 20% MIDTERM 15% * FINAL EXAM 25% PROJECT 40%

You are expected to attend all A take-home midterm over A three-hour examination The capstone project. lectures and precepts. Your the break will cover major during the exam period. It Described below. You will participation in precept concepts in the lectures and will be cumulative but stress share the same grade with discussion is essential to the readings, as well as material from the last half of your partner unless the mastering course material. substantive points of the term. Format is similar to instructor has substantive discussion in precept. Please post a response to the the midterm exam. All reasons to believe the work *Seniors may opt out if they precept question to students must take this has been unevenly divided tell their preceptor in Blackboard 1hr before precept. advance. exam. and performed.

Project Information Podcast: Due April 30, 5pm must also cite scholarly work (such as monographs and journals) that Create a 10-minute audio addresses your topic. The website For the final project, you will form podcast, turned in as an MP3 file, in should have five (5) separate pages, and into teams of two. The goal of the final which you and your partner debate you can include no more than thirty (30) project is to analyze a contemporary the issue in question, being sure to links. technology using the frameworks engage with relevant social technical Much like a research paper, your discussed in class. You will explore this issues and make reference to examples website must contain an argument, topic through a short podcast and a and analytical techniques from the class. and cite evidence for its claims. website or some other interactive Format and presentation of the podcast Although the website can be navigated technology. I describe these elements in are entirely up to you, but keep in mind non-linearly to access the information in detail below. If you have difficulty that your podcast will be evaluated on multiple different ways, this does not finding a partner, please contact the the basis of how well the two of you mean that it can be designed randomly. professor or your preceptor by Week 4 present the various aspects of the issue Students are expected to give serious of the course, and you will be paired in question. Ten minutes is not a long thought to the structure of the site, and with someone who has similar interests. time, use your proposal and feedback to how it presents the issues in a from it to plan plan in advance which balanced manner. Proposal: Due April 3, 5pm issues you wish to discuss before you hit With your partner, select one of the “Record.” You should cite references ten topics listed under “Project Topics” within the podcast, and provide a below. In no more than a single page, bibliography with your audio file. PROJECT TOPICS describe the following: your proposed Website: Due May 12, 5pm Choose from among the topic, which analytical approaches you following issues: will take to the topic based on our You and your partner will design readings, a short outline of your an informative website** on one of the Citizen solar power following ten topics. The website !! podcast, yourplan for your website or Predictive policing interactive project, and your timeline for should include links or references to the !! work on the project. The goal of the sources made in constructing it, and be The Keystone oil pipeline proposal is to get feedback from your able to guide an educated layperson !! instructors about the viability of your through the major parameters of the Music streaming project. To that end, you should present issue and the nuances of its analysis. services (e.g. Spotify) ! as complete a plan as possible. Not all of your sources can be other DIY Manufacturing and websites or journalistic articles; you the makers’ movement ! The Ebola vaccine ** INTERACTIVE PROJECT OPTION ! links and citations included. This The One Laptop Per This year students may, instead of a artifact must also contain an Child project website, choose to create another argument and evidence for its claims. ! piece of interactive technology, such For more on designing effective Digital wallets (e.g. as a mobile app, a game, or technological artifacts that present a Google Wallet, Apple interactive display. In this case, the Pay) critical argument see the following: ! same requirements apply: at least five Military robots pages of text (which may accompany - Agre, Critical Technical Practice ! the artifact as a short paper) with - Sengers et al, Reflective Design Civic open data

[2] COURSE SCHEDULE: READINGS & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1: Three Fallacies about “technology” and “society No reading for first class 2: The politics of technology Claude Fischer, 2014, “All Tech is Social,” Boston Review Blog. OINTS Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts have Politics?,” Daedalus 109 (1980): 121-136. TARTING P Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “How the Refrigerator Got its Hum,” in Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, S The Social Shaping of Technology (Open University Press, 1985).

1: The social construction of technology 1 Trevor Pinch and Ronald Kline, “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture 37 (1998): 763-95. Ellen van Oost “Materialized Gender: How Shavers Configure the Users’ Femininity and Masculinity,” Malein: suadaPinch and Oudshoorn, Eds., How Users Matter (MIT Press, 2003): 193-208. 2:Quis Infrastructure Dolor and innovation ThomasSet Ipsum P. Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” in Wiebe E Bijker, Thomas Parke Hughes, and T. J Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987): 51–82. NALYTICAL NALYTICAL

PPROACHES Paul David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” The American Economic Review 75 (1985): A

A 332-337. Excerpt from Susan Leigh Star, “Power, technology, and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions,” Sociological Review (1990): 25-56. Read pp. 34-36 only.

Consider a piece of technology that you use in your everyday life. What do you know about how it got its Q current shape and capabilities? What uses does it invite, and which users does it exclude? How could it have . been developed differently? 2 1: Where did the internet come from? Corporations and government Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic July 1 1945. Gordon Moore, “The Future of Integrated Electronics,” in David C. Brock, ed., Understanding Moore’s Law: Four Decades of Innovation (Philadelphia: CHF Press, 2006), 37–54. Paul Edwards. “From ‘Impact’ to Social Process: Computers in Society and Culture.” In Sheila Jasanoff et al, eds., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (MIT Press, 1994), 257-286. Read 257-268 only.

NTERNET 2: Where did the Internet come from? The hippies and “the commons” I Fred Turner, “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community.” Technology and Culture 46 (2005): 485-512. HE Dariusz Jemielniak. “Conflict Resolution on Wikipedia: Why Die for Danzig?” Chapter 2 in Common T Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (Stanford University Press, 2014) pp. 59-84. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (13 December 1968): 1243– 1248.

The development of the Internet involved different Relevant Social Groups – corporations, government, and anti-establishmentarians – with their own values, practices, and ideals. What are the main benefits and Q. drawbacks of each approach?

[3] 3 & 1: Crafting large scale systems: industries and governments (David Reinecke) James A. Swaney, “Market Versus Command and Control Environmental Policies,” Journal of Economic Issues 26 (1992): 623–633. 2: Why governments build nuclear weapons and what happens when they get them (Alex Bolfrass) Scott D. Sagan, "Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?: Three Models in Search of a Bomb,” International Security, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Winter, 1996-1997), pp. 54-86.

OVERNMENT [AUDIO] Eric Schlosser interview on NPR’s Fresh Air (August 13, 2014). EGULATION G R Consider your cell phone plan. What is covered by it, what isn’t, and what would you like to be covered? How Q. do you think the company makes its decisions about pricing? Would regulation help the situation or4 not? 1. Patenting what? Bryn William-Jones, “History of a Gene Patent: Tracing the Development and Application of Commercial BRCA Testing,” Health Law Review (2002): 123–146. Greif Karen and Jon Merz, “Who Owns Life” and “The Canavan Disease Patient Case,” in Current Controversies in the biological sciences (2007): 65-76. Adam Liptak, “Justices, 9–0, Bar Patenting Human Genes” in New York Times (13 June 2013). George Poste, “The Case for Genomic Patenting,” Nature 378 (7 December 1995): 534–536. 2: Copyright and Copywrong [AUDIO] “What is original?” NPR TED series, Part 1. ROPERTY James Boyle, “Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure and the Disappearance of the Public Domain,” Daedelus P

NTELLECTUAL 131.2 (2002): 13-25. I Tarleton Gillespie, “Designed to Effectively Frustrate: Copyright, Technology and the Agency of Users,” New Media and Society 8 (2006): 651-669.

Both Intellectual Property and Copyright are frameworks developed in the creative industries but then applied to technological tools and techniques like genetics or music sampling. How do these new contexts Q. challenge our existing regulatory frameworks? Should each new context be treated differently? 5 1: Where did the internet come from? Corporations and government danah boyd, “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen ?

” Engagement with MySpace and Facebook,” in: Digital Race Anthology, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White (Routledge, forthcoming). Alice Marwick, “Leaders and Followers,” Ch. 2 in Status Update (Yale University Press, 2013

OCIAL 2: The ethical and social challenges of Big Dat

S Chris Anderson, "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." “ Wired (June 23, 2008)

S [VIDEO] Kate Crawford and danah boyd, "Six Provocations for Big Data" Microsoft Research @20 ’ years, September 27, 2011. Karen Levy. “Relational Big Data.” Stanford Law Review 66 (September 3, 2013): 73-79. HAT Joseph Turow. “A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry that’s Watching Your Every Click.” The

W Atlantic February 7, 2012. ABOUT SOCIAL TECH

Think of a social media platform that you use regularly. What assumptions does this platform make about their users? What is their revenue model, and what role does personal data play in their business model? Q. Based on this, do you think regulation would help or hurt the development of ethical social technologies?6 [4] 1: “The Inventor” and “the Worker Bee” Tim Wu, “The Disruptive Founder,” Chapter 1 in The Master Switch (Vinatge Books, 2010), pp. 17-32. Kenneth Lipartito, "When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry," American Historical Review 99 (1994). 2: “The Hacker,” “the Pirate,” and “the Tinkerer”

ULTURES Gabriella Coleman. “Hacker Politics and Publics.” Public Culture 23.3 (2011): 511-516. C

NGINEERING Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Geeks, Meta-Geeks, and Gender Trouble: Activism, Identity, and Low- Power FM Radio.” Social Studies of Science 38 (2008): 201-232. E

Think of someone who is famous in technology circles. In what way does this person play into the Q. stereotypes discussed above? In what ways are they different? Is this helpful or hurtful for their success?

1: Patients and Practices 7 Peter Allmark and A. Tod. 2005. “How should public health professionals engage with lay epidemiology?” Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (2006): 460-463. THICS Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch. 1991. “ACTing UP: AIDS cures and lay expertise,” Chapter 7 in The

E Male suada

Golem at Large: What You Should Know About Technology, Cambridge University Press, 126-150. Quis Dolor

& Ruha Benjamin, “Organized Ambivalence: When sickle cell disease and stem cell research converge,” SetEthnicity Ipsum & Health, 16:4-5, 447-463. 2: Consumers and Controversy Nancy Berlinger and Alison Jost, “Nonmedical Exemptions to Mandatory Vaccination,” in Keith Wailoo et al. Julie eds., Three Shots at Prevention: (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2010): 196–212. Peter Doshi, “Influenza: Marketing Vaccine by Marketing Disease,” British Medical Journal 346 (2013): XPERTISE 3037–3042. E

What is the role of experts versus lay experts in the development of technology systems? How should we Q. respect the role of lay expertise and in what ways should we place boundaries upon it compared to other forms of expertise? Does the market help or hurt this process? 8 1: Testing and the social construction of risk John Downer. “When the Chick Hits the Fan: Representativeness and Reproducibility in Technological Tests.” Social Studies of Science Vol. 37, No. 1 (Feb., 2007), pp. 7-26. Atul Gawande, “The Checklist,” The New Yorker (10 December 2007). Charles Bosk, Mary Dixon-Woods, Christine Goeschel, Peter Pronovost, “The art of medicine: reality check for checklists,” The Lancet (8 August 2009), 444-445.

ISASTER 2: Coping with disasters D Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton: Princeton University

& Press. 1999 [1984]), 3–31 only. Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, “The naked launch: Assigning blame for the Challenger Explosion,” Chapter 2 in The Golem at Large, Cambridge University Press, 30-56. ISK Felix Salmon, “Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street,” Wired Magazine 17, no. 3 R (Feb. 23, 2009).

In March 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami caused a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactivity at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which proved to be the largest nuclear disaster since 1986. How were the natural disasters and the technological failures linked? How Q. could such an event be prevented? Is normal accidents theory helpful in thinking about the incident? How should we evaluate the risk of such events? (More information about the disaster is here) 9 [5] 1: Environmental ethics and energy technologies “Energy and Technology,” The Economist special report, January 17th 2015, pp. 3-12. Chelsea Schelly, “Transitioning to Renewable Sources of Electricity: Motivations, Policy, and Potential,” in: Controversies in Science and Technology: From Sustainability to Surveillance, Edited by Daniel Kleinman et al. (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 62-72. 2: Challenges to environmental engineering “Agricultural Antibiotics, features of a controversy,” “Hard red spring wheat at a genetic crossroad,” and “Agricultural Biotechnology and the Environmental Challenge,” in: Controversies in Science NGINEERING and Technology: From Maize to Menopause, Edited by Daniel Kleinman et al. (Oxford University E NVIRONMENTAL Press, 2005), pp. 37-51 and 150-177. E

There is a lot of interest in alternative or “green” energy, but many hurdles in the way of going large-scale. Q. Based on cases we have discussed in the course, what do you think might be the right role of government, private corporations, and lay experts in the development and proliferation of alternative energy?

1: A “Global Village” versus “Many Internets” 10 Jenna Burrell, “Ghanaians Online and the Innovation of 419 Scams,” Ch.3 in Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana (MIT Press, 2012): 55-79. Panos Ipeirotis (2010) ‘Demographics of Mechanical Turk’ (working paper)

LOBALLY 2: Consumers and Controversy

G Jenna Burrell, ‘Is the digital divide a defunct framework?’ The Berkeley Blog, October 8, 2012. Jung Lee, “Invention without Science: ‘Korean Edisons’ and the Changing Understanding of Technology in Colonial Korea,” Technology and Culture 54, no. 4 (2013): 782–814. Adrian Chen, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed” October HINK 23, 2014 (note: offensive content, reader discretion advised.) T

What is the role of experts versus lay experts in the development of technology systems? How should we Q respect the role of lay expertise and in what ways should we place boundaries upon it compared to other . forms of expertise? Does the market help or hurt this process?

1: What is technological science ﬁction a ﬁction of? 11 Lev Grossman, “2045: The year Man Becomes Immortal,” Feburary 10, 2011. Stephen Hawking, “Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence - but are we taking AI seriously enough?” The Independent, May 1 2014. Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, “Resistance is futile: reading science fiction alongside ubiquitous

UTURES computing,” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 18 (2014): 769-778. F 2: Alone or connected? & Sherry Turkle, "No need to call" Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Chapter 10. Christiakis and Fowler, Chapter 8 “Hyperconnected.” Connected: The surprising power of our social

EARS networks,

F Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The Atlantic, June 2012. New York Times Room for Debate "Facebook and Narcissism" – Choose two responses to read.

In your favorite science fiction film or book, how does the piece express the relationship between technology Q. and society, and what tensions does it explore? Where do these anxieties come from, and do you think they are well-founded? What is the author’s or director’s opinion on how these tensions will12 “inevitably” resolve? [6] Participation and Grading PARTICIPATION We will expect you to:

This is an interactive lecture course. ATTEND lecture and precept; That means that participation is not ARRIVE on-time and prepared, only limited to precept: lectures will ASK YOURSELF with readings done; also engage the class in activities, BE PRESENT and limit distractions; questions, and group conversation. Are you listening to your instructor? ENGAGE in course activities and As your instructor, I will do my part to Are you listening to your peers? Are discussion; make the material engaging, you listening actively? understandable, and fun. As students, POST your response to the Are you asking questions of your I offer some guidelines to help you readings to your precept’s forum on peers? Are you respecting what they maximize your learning experience in Blackboard before class; have to say? Do you respond class and achieve strong participation INTERACT RESPECTFULLY respectfully and thoughtfully to their grades. with your peers in person and online comments? A level students come to each class Do you prepare questions or thoughts with questions/comments based on to share in class based on your careful reading and thinking about the readings? OBJECTIVES assignments; have grappled with the material and assumed some Are you asking questions about As a student in this class, you’ll: responsibility for it; encourage others material you don’t understand? GAIN an introductory overview of to formulate their ideas; listen Are you drawing connections to other the relationship between technology attentively and forward or debate the course material? and society, comments of predecessors with the READ both classic and modern Do you come to class well-rested, fed, goal of elucidating and going deeper theories and case studies in the and leaving distractions at the door? into the material. domain for their theoretical approach Do you turn off your phone, wifi B level students are present but their and empirical contribution; comments do not reflect a serious devices, chat systems, and other TALK with your peers and electronic communication systems so prior engagement with the texts; they instructor in class, fostering fruitful, that you may give your full attention may speak merely to be heard or wait generative class discussion that to what is going on in class? for others to ask interesting questions encourages you and your peers to and then react. Although they listen to How enthusiastically I can answer think deeply about the role of other students, they do not make an these questions will determine your technology in society; effort to integrate others’ views into grade along the following general INTERACT fruitfully online, the ongoing discussion. They express scale: sharing ideas, news, or other opinions as opposed to articulating materials to support our 90%-100% (~A): excellent ideas. conversations in class; 80%-90% (~B): very good WORK IN A TEAM on a research C level students attend class regularly project, and develop a ﬁnal project but their engagement is perfunctory 70%-80% (~C): could be improved discussing an aspect of technology in or irrelevant; contributions may be 60%-70% (~D): needs improvement society. sporadic or digressive and not below 50% (~F): unsatisfactory As your instructor, my goal is to informed by careful preparation. They help you to achieve these objectives. may hammer positions or, conversely, Please contact me if you are having fail to realize which issues are at (Adapted from: Council of the any diﬃculties with course concepts stake. Humanities Grading Guidelines) or procedures.

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