• Bozzini David Manuel

• Bozzini David Manuel

This lecture examines the history of digital technologies to highlight the social and cultural orders producing them. We explore various assemblages and configurations of social groups with digital technologies starting with the early history of computing, the emergence of computer networks and the Internet, the sociocultural and gendered organization of digital labor, the politics of platfomization and datafication and the governance and management of cybersecurity but we explore also parallel histories, delving for instance in countercultures and hacking collectives, in non-Western perspectives on computing or in the reassessment of digital technologies in the anthropocene. The lecture is built around an interdisciplinary body of research in anthropology, sociology, history, gender studies, computer science and STS.

The main objective of this lecture is to build students’ awareness of the social and the cultural dimensions of digital technologies in their historical trajectories. It shows how the social is reconfigured by and embedded in those technologies. Based on case studies, it also examines various theories on innovation, technology, power, culture and infrastructure.

Students are expected to actively participate in the classroom discussions, read excerpts of key texts and contribute creatively towards the end of the semester to the lecture’s archive of “the computer/internet trivia and odd stories”.

Requirements:
Grade will be based on:
- Participation to class discussion and class preparation (20%)
- Contribution to the lecture’s archive (20%)
- Written essay exam (60%)

A complete bibliography will be distributed at the beginning of the course.

Abbate, Janet. 1999. Inventing the Internet, Inside technology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Akrich, Madeleine. 1994. "Comment sortir de la dichotomie technique/société. Présentation des diverses sociologies de la technique." In De la préhistoire aux missiles balistiques: l'intelligence sociale des techniques, edited by Bruno Latour and Pierre Lemonnier, 105-131. Paris: La Découverte.

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting things out : classification and its consequences, Inside technology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Ceruzzi, Paul E. 2012. Computing: A Concise History. The MIT Press.

Edwards, Paul N. 1996. The closed world: computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America, Inside technology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Mullaney, Thomas S., Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip. 2021. Your computer is on fire. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London England: The MIT Press.

Winner, Langdon. 1980. "Do Artifacts Have Politics?"  Daedalus 109 (1):121-136.