Syllabus for Computers and the Open Society - 2012 

CS 47N (Freshman Seminar)
MW 3:15-4:30, Thornton 210

Terry Winograd, Computer Science 

1. Introduction - Technologies and Values

• Mon Sept 24 - Introduction to the class and to the Internet
• Wed Sept 26 - NO CLASS - Yom Kippur
  

• Mon Oct 1 - Understanding stakeholders, values, conflicts

  Readings

  • Batya Friedman, Value-sensitive design, interactions Volume 3 Issue 6, Nov./Dec. 1996, Pages 16 - 23
  • Terry Winograd, Notes on Values in Technology Design .
  
  
• Due by noon Monday: Assignment 1: Expert topic
  
  

2. Virtual worlds

• Wed Oct. 3 (regular class time but not regular place) - Tour of the the Virtual Human Interaction Lab Meet in the lobby of McClatchey Hall (main quad).

Readings

• Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson - Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds,and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution, HarperCollins, 2011. Introduction, pp. 1-8:
• Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter, Virtual worlds: a Primer, in J. Balkin and B. Novek (eds., The State of Play, Chapter 1, 13-28.
• Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blascovich, Virtual Reality and Social Networks Will Be a Powerful Combination, IEEE Spectrum, June 2011.
  

Additional resources

• A 20 minute video that gives a concise summary of the lab's overall work: http://vhil.stanford.edu/mm/2008/tsi-metaverse.html
• Bailenson/Blascovich book chapter on "doppelgangers" which covers the lab's most recent work http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2010/bailenson-ow-virtual-doppelgangers.pdf
• Jesse Fox, Dylan Arena, and Jeremy N. Bailenson, Virtual Reality: A Survival Guide for the Social Scientist http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2009/fox-jmp-vr-survival.pdf

3. Human connections and identity

Proposition: The rapidly increasing amount of time we spend in cyberspace detracts from people's real-life interactions

• Mon Oct 8 - Discussion of issues
  • Due by 10am Monday - Issue analysis of the proposition:

Readings

• E.M., Forster The Machine Stops 1909
• Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Basic Books, 2011. Necessary Conversations, 279-305.
• Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, Networked Relationships, in Networked, Chapter 5, 117-146.

Additional Resources

• Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon&Schuster, 1995.

Proposition: Allowing anonymity or pseudonymity in on-line interactions is bad for the quality of social discourse

• Wed Oct 11 - Discussion
  • Due by 10am Wednesday - Issue analysis of this proposition
    

Readings

• Tamer Lewin, Teenage Insults, Scrawled on Web, Not on Walls, New York Times, May 5, 2010
• Danah Boyd, The Politics of 'Real Names', Communications of the ACM, Vol. 55 No. 8, Pages 29-31
• Pete Cashmore, Why Google+ will never back down on real names CNN, August 29, 2011
• Adrianne Jeffries, Facebook's fake-name fight grows as users skirt the rules, September 17, 2012
• Carl Franzen, Facebook Surveying Users About Their Friends Fake Usernames, September 20, 2012

4. Coping with the Digital Deluge

Proposition: to be formulated at the dinner with Howard Rheingold

• Monday Oct 15 No regular class - 6:30 dinner and discussion with Howard Rheingold at Prof. Winograd's Home on Campus

Assignment - do over the weekend to discuss at the dinner

• Write down on a card or piece of paper what you plan to accomplish -- just a few words -- when you sit down in front of your computer. Then whenever you happen to glance at the paper or be reminded of it, ask yourself where your attention is directed online. You don't need to judge, just note.

Readings

• Howard Rheingold, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, MIT Press, 2012
  • Chapter 1: Attention, pp. 35-75
  • Chapter 2: Crap Detection 101, pp. 77-109.
    
    
• Wed Oct 17: Class discussion
  • Due by 10am Wednesday - Issue analysis of the Proposition
  • Initial discussion of election technologies for next Wed. presentations.

5. Elections and Politics

• Mon Oct 22 -Computers and elections
  • Assignment due: Technology and the U.S. elections - student presentations

Readings - to be announced

6. The future of Journalism

Proposition: Thanks to technology, journalism is becoming irrelevant as a field

• Wed Oct 24 - Journalism
  • Guest Speaker, Russ Baker, Journalist, founder of WhoWhatWhy.com
  • Due by 10am Wednesday - Issue analysis of the Proposition

Readings

• Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You, Penguin, 2011, Chapter 2, The User is the Content, pp. 47-76.
• Josh Cohen, Reflections on Informational Technology and Democracy, Boston Review, March 4, 2009.
• Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, Clay Shirky Blog, March 13 2009

7. Privacy

Proposition: New technologies will increasingly violate individual privacy

• Mon Oct 29 - Privacy in the Internet Age
  • Due by 10 am Monday: Issue analysis of the proposition

Readings

• Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, Stanford Univ. Press, 2010, Part I, Information Technology's Power and Threat, 19-64.
• VIDEO Cory Doctorow, Privacy-is-it-time-for-a-revolution
• Emily Steel and April Dembosky, Facebook raises fears with ad tracking, Financial Times, Sept. 23, 2012

Additional Resources

• Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen,and Harry Lewis, Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion, Pearson, 2008
  • on-line Chapter 2, Naked in the Sunlight: privacy lost, privacy abandoned, 19-72
• Simson Garfinkel, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, O'Reilly, 2000,
  • on-line Chapter 1, Privacy under Attack, 1-12
    
    
    
• Wed Oct 31 - Visit to Facebook
  • We will have a bus available at 3:15 (sharp!) which will return sometime after 5:30 (details to be filled in - we may be able to have supper there).

Readings

• Do a web search on [facebook privacy] and find some interesting material to share with the class.

8. The Power of Google

Proposition: The concentrated power of Google is an unprecedented danger to our identities and freedom

• Mon Nov 5 - discuss proposition
  • Due by 10 am Monday: Issue analysis of the proposition

  Readings

• Evgeny Morozov, Don't Be Evil, New Republic, July 13, 2011

Additional Resources

• Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything  (and why we should worry), Univ. of California Press, 2011
• Ken  Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, Penguin Press, 2009
• Steven Levy, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives , Simon & Schuster, 2011
• Douglas Edwards, I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011
• James Gleick, How Google Dominates Us, NY review of books, August 18, 2011

9. Forecasting the Future of Technology

• Wed Nov 7 - No class session. Dinner with Paul Saffo.

Readings

• Henry Adams, A Law of Acceleration from The Education of Henry Adams, 1904

10. Liberation technologies

Proposition: Communication and computer technologies will promote democracy

• Mon Nov 12 - Liberation Technologies: Guest speakers Larry Diamond, Stanford CDDRL, Morgan Marquis-Boire and Bill Marczak

Readings

• Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner, Liberation Technology, Johns Hopkins Press, 2012
  • Larry Diamond, Chapter 1, Liberation Technology, pp. 3-17
  • Ronald Diebert and Rafal Rohozinsky, Liberation vs. Control: The Future of Cyberspace, Chapter 2, pp. 18-32.
• John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996
• Nicole Perlroth, Software Meant to Fight Crime Is Used to Spy on Dissidents, New York Times, August 30, 2012.

Further Resources

• Clay Shirky, Here comes Everybody, Chapter 1, It takes a village to find a phone
• Clay Shirky, The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2011
• Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Public Affairs, 2011.
• Clay Shirky, The Net Advantage, Prospect, Dec 11, 2009
• Howard Rheingold, Mobile Media and Political Collective Interaction, in Politics and Social Change (2008)
• Malcolm Gladwell, Small Change, New Yorker, October 4, 2010
• Due by 10am Monday: Issue analysis of the proposition

11. Computers and language

Proposition: Computers have passed the Turing Test

• Wed Nov 14 - SHRDLU, History and issues of AI, Watson, Siri

Readings

• Watch NOVA | Smartest Machine on Earth
• Nick Clairmont, How close is the Turing test to being beaten? June 2012
• Brian Christian, Mind vs. Machine, The Atlantic, 2009
• Winograd, Terry (1980), "What does it mean to understand language?," Cognitive Science 4:3 (July-Sept 1980)

Additional Resources

• Winograd, Terry (1984), "Computer software for working with language," Scientific American 251:3 (September, 1984), 230-245.

Nov 19-23 THANKSGIVING BREAK

12. Robots and artificial intelligence

Proposition: Computers will soon reach the point of matching and then exceeding human intelligence

Readings

• John Markoff, Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man, New York Times  July 25, 2009
• Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Penguin 1999, Prologue 1-8.
• On Ray Kurzweil's The Age Of Spiritual Machines:  a dialog between  Robert J. Sawyer  and  A. K. Dewdney  First published in The Ottawa Citizen, Sunday, April 4, 1999.
• Bill Joy, Why the future doesn't need us. Wired, Issue 8.04 - Apr 2000
• Robert J. Sawyer, Response to Bill Joy: Is Technological Advancement Worth the Risks?
  

• Monday November 26: Artificial Intelligence
• Due by 10am Monday : Issue analysis of the proposition.
  
  
• Wed Nov 28 - Field Trip to Willow Garage robotics laboratory, will go past 4:30

11. Conclusion

• Mon Dec 3- Student presentations of expert topics
• Wed Dec 5 - Rest of student presentations and course debrief

Relevant Books published in the last couple years

1. Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Knopf, 2010.
2. Steven Levy, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, Simon & Schuster, 2011
3. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Basic Books, 2011.
4. Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson - Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds,and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution, HarperCollins, 2011.
5. Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything  (and why we should worry), Univ. of California Press, 2011
6. Ken  Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, Penguin Press, 2009.
7. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Norton, 2010
8. Helen Nissenbaum , Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, Stanford Univ. Press, 2010
9. Jane Mcgonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World, Penguin, 2011
10. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Public Affairs, 2011
11. Cyrus Farivar - The Internet of Elsewhere: The Emergent Effects of a Wired World, Rutgers U. Press, 2011
12. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You, Penguin 2011
13. Clay Shirky, Cognitive surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Penguin, 2010
14. Howard Rheingold, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, MIT Press, 2012
15. Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (eds.), Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, John Hopkins U. Press, 2012
16. Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, Networked: The New Social Operating System, MIT Press, 2012.
17. Julie Cohen, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice, Yale University Press, 2012.
18. Andrew Keen, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution is Dividing, Diminshing, and Disorienting Us, St. Martin's Press, 2012.