New York University
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
Topics in Digital Media: Digital Media & Materiality
MCC-GE 2133
Classroom location TBD
Wed 11:00 AM – 1:10 PM
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Professor Nicole Starosielski
411 Lafayette, 3FL
[email protected]
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COURSE DESCRIPTION
Part reaction to the hyped “immateriality” of the internet and part reaction to the textual
approaches of cultural media studies, there has been a recent emergence of research on
the materiality of media and communication. This work, at times grouped under the “new
materialisms,” has extended from research in material culture to media archaeologies
inspired by German media theory, and from studies of media infrastructure to cultural
geographies of ubiquitous computing. This seminar will introduce students with the range
of recent materialist research, while at the same time maintaining a skepticism about
claims of the “newness” of this approach and the coherence or unity of the “material
turn” in social theory. While including materialist media theory, the course will also
focus on the elemental aspects of digital media – from codes and circuits to power
generation and storage – in order to assess the usefulness of materialist and infrastructural
analytics for understanding contemporary media systems.
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LEARNING OUTCOMES
After completing this course, students will be able to effectively:
• Identify what materiality means in critical terms for the study of digital media
• Compare materialist theory across various aspects of digital media formats,
infrastructure, software and storage
• Evaluate the effects of digitizing material culture and assess the materiality of
digital transmission
• Synthesize the media ecology of the digital realm in terms of the politics of space,
labor, economy, waste, etc.
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REQUIRED TEXTS
Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: Harper
Collins, 2012).
Internet Infrastructure Industry Resources
Telecom Ramblings: http://www.telecomramblings.com/
Telegeography: http://www.telegeography.com/
Network World: http://www.networkworld.com/
Data Center Map: http://www.datacentermap.com/
Submarine Cable Networks: http://submarinenetworks.com/
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Internet World Stats: http://www.internetworldstats.com/
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ASSIGNMENTS
Participation will be based on attendance, diligent reading, and active participation in all
class discussions .Students will be asked to write one midterm paper (10 – 15 pages)
deconstructing arguments of materiality/immateriality on a topic of their choice in media
and communication. They will also be responsible for completing a final paper (20
pages) that fleshes out the media ecology of a particular digital media environment or
technology using the “new materialism” arguments and citing specific evidence of social
change. Detailed instructions be provided to students in class for both required
assignments.
Evaluation
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Participation: 20%
Midterm Paper (Week 7): 30%
Final Paper (Week 14): 50%
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Evaluation Rubric
A= Excellent
This work is comprehensive and detailed, integrating themes and concepts from
discussions, lectures and readings. Writing is clear, analytical and organized. Arguments
offer specific examples and concisely evaluate evidence. Students who earn this grade are
prepared for class, synthesize course materials and contribute insightfully.
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B=Good
This work is complete and accurate, offering insights at general level of understanding.
Writing is clear, uses examples properly and tends toward broad analysis. Classroom
participation is consistent and thoughtful.
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C=Average
This work is correct but is largely descriptive, lacking analysis. Writing is vague and at
times tangential. Arguments are unorganized, without specific examples or analysis.
Classroom participation is inarticulate.
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D= Unsatisfactory
This work is incomplete, and evidences little understanding of the readings or
discussions. Arguments demonstrate inattention to detail, misunderstand course material
and overlook significant themes. Classroom participation is spotty, unprepared and off
topic.
F=Failed
This grade indicates a failure to participate and/or incomplete assignments
A = 94-100
A- = 90-93
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B+ = 87-89
B = 84-86
B- = 80-83
C+ = 77-79
C = 74-76
C- = 70-73
D+ = 65-69
D = 60-64
F = 0-59
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COURSE POLICIES
Absences and Lateness
Attendance is mandatory. More than two unexcused absences will automatically result in
a lower grade. Chronic lateness will also be reflected in your evaluation of participation.
Regardless of the reason for your absence you will be responsible for any missed work.
Travel arrangements do not constitute a valid excuse for rescheduling exams. There are
no extra credit assignments for this class.
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Format
Please type and double-space your written work. Typing improves the clarity and
readability of your work and double-spacing allows room for me to comment. Please
also number and staple multiple pages. You are free to use your preferred citation style.
Please use it consistently throughout your writing. If sending a document electronically,
please name the file in the following format Yourlastname Coursenumber
Assignment1.doc
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Grade Appeals
Please allow two days to pass before you submit a grade appeal. This gives you time to
reflect on my assessment. If you still want to appeal your grade, please submit a short
but considered paragraph detailing your concerns. Based on this paragraph I will review
the question and either augment your grade or refine my explanation for the lost points.
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General Decorum
Slipping in late or leaving early, sleeping, text messaging, surfing the Internet, doing
homework in class, eating, etc. are distracting and disrespectful to all participants in the
course.
Academic Dishonesty and Plagiarism
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/policies/academic_integrity
The relationship between students and faculty is the keystone of the educational
experience at New York University in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and
Human Development. This relationship takes an honor code for granted and mutual trust,
respect, and responsibility as foundational requirements. Thus, how you learn is as
important as what you learn. A university education aims not only to produce highquality scholars, but to also cultivate honorable citizens.
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Academic integrity is the guiding principle for all that you do, from taking exams to
making oral presentations to writing term papers. It requires that you recognize and
acknowledge information derived from others and take credit only for ideas and work
that are yours.
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You violate the principle of academic integrity when you
• cheat on an exam,
• submit the same work for two different courses without prior permission from
your professors,
• receive help on a takehome examination that calls for independent work, or
• plagiarize.
Plagiarism, one of the gravest forms of academic dishonesty in university life, whether
intended or not, is academic fraud. In a community of scholars, whose members are
teaching, learning, and discovering knowledge, plagiarism cannot be tolerated.
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Plagiarism is failure to properly assign authorship to a paper, a document, an oral
presentation, a musical score, and/or other materials that are not your original work. You
plagiarize when, without proper attribution, you do any of the following:
• copy verbatim from a book, an article, or other media;
• download documents from the Internet;
• purchase documents;
• report from other’s oral work;
• paraphrase or restate someone else’s facts, analysis, and/or conclusions; or
• copy directly from a classmate or allow a classmate to copy from you.
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Your professors are responsible for helping you to understand other people's ideas, to use
resources and conscientiously acknowledge them, and to develop and clarify your own
thinking. You should know what constitutes good and honest scholarship, style guide
preferences, and formats for assignments for each of your courses. Consult your
professors for help with problems related to fulfilling course assignments, including
questions related to attribution of sources.
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Through reading, writing, and discussion, you will undoubtedly acquire ideas from
others, and exchange ideas and opinions with others, including your classmates and
professors. You will be expected, and often required, to build your own work on that of
other people. In so doing, you are expected to credit those sources that have contributed
to the development of your ideas.
Avoiding Academic Dishonesty
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Organize your time appropriately to avoid undue pressure, and acquire good study
habits, including note taking.
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Learn proper forms of citation. Always check with your professors of record for
their preferred style guides. Directly copied material must always be in quotes;
paraphrased material must be acknowledged; even ideas and organization derived
from your own previous work or another's work need to be acknowledged.
Always proofread your finished work to be sure that quotation marks, footnotes
and other references were not inadvertently omitted. Know the source of each
citation.
Do not submit the same work for more than one class without first obtaining the
permission of both professors even if you believe that work you have already
completed satisfies the requirements of another assignment.
Save your notes and drafts of your papers as evidence of your original work.
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Disciplinary Sanctions
When a professor suspects cheating, plagiarism, and/or other forms of academic
dishonesty, appropriate disciplinary action may be taken following the department
procedure or through referral to the Committee on Student Discipline.
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The Steinhardt School Statement on Academic Integrity is consistent with the New York
University Policy on Student Conduct, published in the NYU Student Guide.
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STUDENT RESOURCES
• Students with physical or learning disabilities are required to register with the
Moses Center for Students with Disabilities, 726 Broadway, 2nd Floor, (212-9984980) and are required to present a letter from the Center to the instructor at the
start of the semester in order to be considered for appropriate accommodation.
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Writing Center: 411 Lafayette, 4th Floor. Schedule an appointment online at
www.rich15.com/nyu/ or just walk-in.
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SCHEDULE OF CLASSES, READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS
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Week 1: Introduction
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Week 2: Materialisms (New, Historical, Digital)
Readings: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Introduction: Materialism vs. Idealism” and
“Materialism and Idealism: The Two Basic Schools of Philosophy,” Reader in Marxist
Philosophy: From the Writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, eds. Howard Selsam and
Harry Martel (New York: International Publishers, 1998): 45-53.
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms.” New
Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012): 146.
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Bill Brown, “Materiality” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and
Mark. B.N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010): 49-63.
Jeremy Packer & Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, “Strategies for Materializing
Communication,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 9:1 (2012): 107-113.
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Week 3: Infrastructural Encounters
Readings: Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York:
Harper Collins, 2012).
Shannon Mattern, “Infrastructural Tourism.”
http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/2012/07/20/infrastructural-tourism/
Haidy Geismar, “Digital + Museum = ?”
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Week 4: Digitizing Material Culture
Readings: Daniel Miller, “Materiality: An Introduction”
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/academic_staff/d_miller/mil-8
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Amiria Salmond, “Digital Subjects, Cultural Objects: Special Issue introduction,”
Journal of Material Culture (September 2012) 17: 211-228.
Fiona Cameron, “Beyond the Cult of the Replicant – Museums and Historical Digital
Objects: Traditional Concerns, New Discourses,” Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage:
A Critical Discourse, eds Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2007), 49-76.
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Week 5: The Materiality of Transmission
Readings: Barney Warf and Santa Arias, “Introduction: The Reinsertion of Space into the
Humanities and Social Sciences,” The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds. London: Routledge, 2009), 1-10.
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David Morley, “Communications and Transport: The Mobility of Information, People
and Commodities,” Media, Culture, & Society 33 (2011): 743-759.
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E. Malecki and H. Wei, “A Wired World: The Evolving Geography of Submarine Cables
and the Shift to Asia,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (2009):
360-382.
Saskia Sassen, “Overview,” The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 2001), 3-15.
Graham Candy, “The Social Topographies of Online Games: China and North
America in a Comparative Frame,” talk online at: http://www.grahamcandy.com/?p=538.
Week 6: The Materiality of Software
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Readings: Alex Galloway, “Introduction” and “Physical Media.” Protocol: How Control
Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 2-53.
Jean-François Blanchette, “A Material History of Bits,” Journal of the American Society
for Information Science and Technology 62, no. 6 (June 2011): 1042–1057.
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Matthew Fuller, “Introduction”; Derek Robinson, “Function”; Olga Goriunova and
Alexei Shulgin, “Glitch”; and Lev Manovich, “Import/Export.” Software Studies: A
Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 1-15, 101-125.
Wendy Chun, “Daemonic Interfaces, Empowering Obfuscations.” Programmed Visions:
Software and Memory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 59-95.
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Week 7: The Materiality of Storage
Readings: Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Introduction: Awareness of the Mechanism,”
“‘Every Contact Leaves a Trace’: Storage, Inscription, and Computer Forensics,” and
“Extreme Inscription: A Grammatology of the Hard Drive,” Mechanisms: New Media
and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 1-109.
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Sean Cubitt, Robert Hassan and Ingrid Volkmer, “Does Cloud Computing Have a Silver
Lining?” Media Culture Society 33 (2011): 149-158.
Week 8: Electrical and Optical Power
Readings: Thomas Parke Hughes, “Introduction,” Networks of Power: Electrification in
Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 1-15.
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Stephen Graham, “When Infrastructures Fail,” Richard G. Little, “Managing the Risk of
Cascading Failure in Complex Urban Infrastructures,” and Timothy W. Luke, “Power
Loss or Blackout: The Electricity Network Collapse of August 2003 in North America,”
in Stephen Graham ed. Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 1-40, 55-68.
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Nadia Bozak, “Introduction” and “Energy,” The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera,
Natural Resources (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 1-35.
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Week 9: Media Ecologies and Digital Objects
Readings: Matthew Fuller, “Introduction: Media Ecologies” and “How This Becomes
That,” Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2005), 1-54, 85-108.
Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things,” Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1-19.
Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka, “Editorial,” in “Unnatural Ecologies” a special issue
of The Fibreculture Journal 17 (2011) (http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/)
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Week 10: Labor and Maintenance
Readings: Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Maintenance
and Repair,” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (May 2007): 1-25.
Seth Perlow, “On Production for Digital Culture: iPhone Girl, Electronics assembly, and
the Material forms of Aspiration,” Convergence 17 (2011): 245-269.
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Selections from Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor
Scholz
Week 11: Materials
Readings: Elizabeth Grossman, “Raw Materials: Where Bits, Bytes, and the Earth’s Crust
Coincide” and “Producing High Tech: The Environmental Impact.” High-Tech Trash:
Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health (Washington: Island Press, 2006),
17-75.
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Leslie A. Byster and Ted Smith, “The Electronics Production Life Cycle From Toxics to
Sustainability: Getting off the Toxic Treadmill,” David N Pellow, David A. Sonnenfeld,
and Ted Smith, eds. Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in
the Global Electronics Industry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005),
(http://site.ebrary.com/lib/nyulibrary/docDetail.action?docID=10180177).
Jeffrey W Mantz, “Improvisational Economies: Coltan Production in the Eastern Congo.”
Social Anthropology 16 no. 1 (2008): 34–50.
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Week 12: Digital Disposal
Readings: Jussi Parikka, “Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste,”
Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste (Open
Humanities Press, 2011),
(http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Electronic_waste/Introduction)
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Ravi Agarwal and Kishore Wankhade, “Hi-Tech Heaps, Forsaken Lives: E-Waste in
Delhi,” David N Pellow, David A. Sonnenfeld, and Ted Smith, eds. Challenging the
Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005),
(http://site.ebrary.com/lib/nyulibrary/docDetail.action?docID=10180177).
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Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media.” Residual Media, ed.
Charles Acland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 16-31.
Screening: Exporting Harm: The High Tech Trashing of Asia
Week 13: Materialist Experience and Everyday Space
Readings: Adrian Mackenzie, “Introduction.” Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in
Network Cultures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 1-31.
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Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, “Introduction” and “Remarking Everyday Objects,”
Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 1-22, 47-65.
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Week 14: Paper Presentations
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Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, “Introduction: The Myth and Mess of Ubiquitous
Computing” and “Contextualizing Ubiquitous Computing,” Divining a Digital Future:
Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 1-44.
Paul Dourish and M. Mazmanian. 2011. Media as Material: Information Representations
as Material Foundations for Organizational Practice. Third International Symposium on
Process Organization Studies (Corfu, Greece).
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