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Continuing Studies Summer Course Syllabus

Virtuality (Philosophy 14)
Tuesdays, 7:00 - 8:50 p.m.
June 23 - July 28 (no class meeting on July 7)

Instructor: Timothy Lenoir

Course Description | Calendar | Coursework | Projects

Course Description

New media technology such as the printing press, photography, film, and, more recently, computer-mediated communication as well as computer-generated visualization and simulation: all these have had profound effects on our conceptions of objectivity, agency, the self, and the body. This course explores several historical episodes in which technologically mediated virtual worlds have transformed our experience of the "real." We will begin with a brief introduction to theories of mediated experience, and then move to a consideration of the invention of graphism in paleolithic times and the relation between linear writing and graphic presentation. We will then move to 17th century considerations of technologies of "virtual witnessing" in constructing arguments about scientific facts, followed by a consideration of the 18th century fascination with the disembodied subject in works such as Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiment. Questions of embodiment will guide our consideration of the ways in which new forms of computer mediated experience are constructing virtual worlds, while readings on hypertext, cyberspace, and cyborgs will frame our exploration of the shifts new hypermedia may introduce into our practices of reading, rhetoric, and possibly even our ways of being ourselves.

Calendar

1. June 23 Introduction
Media
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 3-63.
 
 
2. June 30
Signs, Representations, Gestures
André Leroi-Gourhan, Speech and Gesture (Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press, 1993), pp. 187-266.
 
Recommended:
Alberto Manguel, "The Silent Readers," from A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996), pp. 42-53.
 
 
3. July 14
Virtual Witnessing & Materialities of Communication
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, "Seeing and Believing: The Experimental Production of Pneumatic Facts," in Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 23-79.
 
Daniel DeFoe, Robinson Crusoe (London: Penguin, 1965), pp. 80- 117; 199-230.
 
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 9-66; & Part III, Ch. I, pp. 1-3.
 
Recommended:
David Marshall, "Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments," Critical Inquiry, 10 (1984), 592­613.
John Bender, "Enlightenment Fiction and Scientific Hypothesis," Representations, Vol. 60 (Winter 1997), pp. 1-23.
 
 
4. July 21
Computer-Mediated Communcation
Vaneevar Bush, "As We May Think," Atlantic Magazine, August,1945, in SiliconBase.
 
Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework," Stanford Research Institute Report AF 49(63-8)-1024
 
George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporay Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 2-119.
 
Recommended:
Tim McLaughlin, Notes Toward Absolute Zero, a piece of interactive fiction, using Storyspace by J. Bolter et al. (1 MB, Mac binhex compressed)
 
 
5. July 28
Computer Mediated Habitats and Virtual Community
Sherry Turkel, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 10-49; 125-148; 179-209; 233-269.
 
William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 3-57; 163-173.
Recommended:
Ralph Schroeder, 'Networked Worlds: Social Aspects of Multi-User Virtual Reality Technology'Sociological Research Online, vol. 2, no. 4, (1997).
Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, "The Lessons of Lucasfilmís Habitat, in Michael Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp.273-302.
Habitat: on course website
Moira, "Colony Alpha: Making Active Worlds." On course website.

Coursework and Requirements

 

Students wishing credit for this course will be required to produce a term project. The project can be in the form of a term paper, a website or simulation. I encourage students to work together on the course projects. I will assist in clarifying the project as we proceed, but below are a few ideas of the sorts of things you might contemplate as a term project.

Ideas for Projects

A. Study an artifact (traditional paper format is fine, but think about how to cite non-print artifacts) --

  1. Contrast the UNIX or DOS shell with the Mac or Windows interfaces. What ontologies are implied? What is the status of the subject, the witness, the body?
  2. Examine an existing piece of VR, such as
    1. Habitat --
    2. MERL 's social vr -- http://www.merl.com/threads/social/
    3. SimCity
    4. ...

    Compare it with traditional virtualities (eg. Crusoe, the debit card). How is it authored? How is it received, read, experienced?


  3. McLuhan says that the medium is the message, but maybe the message of online text is that the natural medium for large masses of text is paper. Current computer interfaces are not well-suited for intense readings of book-sized assemblies of text. But there are people (at Media Lab and maybe GA Tech) who are playing with small fragments of dynamic text for poetic and other purposes. We see dynamic typography in TV ads. A topic for a creative or analytic project could be dynamic typography. Check out the work at the MIT Media Lab.

B. Do a creative piece --

Using a computational authoring system of your choice, such as any HTML editor

create a piece of fiction, or a simulation, or a visualization. Compare it with more traditional writing technologies. How might your creation be different? One good way to do this project might be to create alternate treatments of a given theme in different "media," eg. a photo essay vs. a hypertext.

C. Write an analytic work (traditional paper format is fine) --

  1. Does a nonlinear system of writing shape the way we think about or experience the world differently than linear systems of writing? What does linearity mean to you in this context? Choose some examples from recent technologies (eg. word processor or musical score editor) and pre-computer technologies.
  2. Trace the evolution of the notion, role and locus of the subject in some recent technologies. Consider, for example, what ubiquitous computing, or embedded cognition might imply.
  3. Read Jaron Lanier's comments about post-symbolic communication. Is it possible? What are some reasons to believe or disbelieve his claims? (http://www.well.com/user/jaron/columbia.html)
  4. Compare a pictographic/ideographic writing system (like Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Chinese) with a phonetic writing system like English. Speculate on the evolution of graphical user interfaces. Why are computer interfaces so ocularcentric? (See A1.)

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Last modified 22 June 1998