Spring 2018
2 units
Tu & Th: 3:30-5:00
202 South Hall
Prof. Jenna Burrell (jburrell@nullberkeley.edu)
Course Description
This course is designed to be an introduction to the topics and issues associated with the study of information and information technology, from a social scientific perspective. Students will be introduced to a broad range of applied and practical problems, theoretical issues, as well as methods for answering different types of questions.
This 2-credit half semester course is required for Masters students in the Master of Information and Management of Systems (MIMS) degree program at the ISchool at UC-Berkeley.
SECTION 1 – theories of technology in society
Tuesday March 13th – intro to the class
- Aguera y Arcas et al (2017) Physiognomy’s New Clothes on Medium
- OPTIONAL: Hardt, How Big Data is Unfair
- OPTIONAL: Video: Gender Shades – how well do IBM, Microsoft, and Face++ AI services guess the gender of a face?
Thursday March 15th – technological determinism
- Winner, L. (1999). Do Artifacts Have Politics? In D. MacKenzie & J. Wajcman (Eds.), The Social Shaping of Technology. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press: 22-40.
- Fischer, C. (1992). America Calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. (chapter 1)
Tuesday March 20th – theorizing the user in society
- Fischer, C. (1992). America Calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. (chapter 3, chapter 6, bibliographic essay)
Thursday March 22nd – social constructivism
- Bijker, W. (1995) “King of the Road: The Social Construction of the Safety Bicycle” In W. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
March 27th & 29th – NO CLASS SPRING BREAK
SECTION 2 – delegation between humans and machines
Tuesday April 3rd – the socio-technical gap
- Ackerman, M. (2001). The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2-3), 181-205.
Thursday April 5th – implicit interaction
- Ju and Leifer (2007) The Design of Implicit Interactions: Making Interactive Systems Less Obnoxious
- Ars Technica: Death by GPS: why do we follow digital maps into dodgy places? – https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/death-by-gps/
Tuesday April 10th – professionalization and worker autonomy
- Novek, J. (2002). “IT, Gender, and Professional Practice: Or, Why an Automated Drug Distribution system was Sent Back to the Manufacturer.” Science, Technology & Human Values, 27 (3), 379-403.
- Mukherjee (2017) AI vs. MD. The New Yorker
- OPTIONAL (but recommended): How technology led a hospital to give a patient 38 times his dosage
Thursday April 12th – algorithmic management of workers
- Lee et al (2015) Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers (a study of Uber and Lyft drivers)
- ‘Working Anything but 9 to 5: Scheduling Technology Leaves Low-Income Parents With Hours of Chaos’ (2014) [NYTimes] and addendum – ‘Starbucks to Revise Policies to End Irregular Schedules for its 130,000 Baristas’ (2014) [NYTimes]
SECTION 3 – networked sociability
Tuesday April 17th – new issues in a networked society
- Boyd, d. (2010) “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (ed. Zizi Paparharissi), pp. 39-58.
- Tufekci (2017) Chapter 6: Platforms and Algorithms, from Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
Thursday April 19th – anonymity, pseudonymity, reputation and community
- Tufekci (2017) Chapter 7: Names and Connections, from Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
- Bernstein, M. et al (2011) 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Online Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community. In Proceedings of the ICWSM-11. Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblog and Social Media. Barcelona, Spain.
Thursday April 24th – Wikipedia and commons-based peer production
- Kriplean et al (2008) Articulations of WikiWork: Uncovering Valued Work in Wikipedia Through Barnstars
- Geiger R. S. and D. Ribes, (2010) The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal. In Proceedings ofthe 2010 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Savannah, GA
Thursday April 26th – shaping behavior in online spaces
- Lampe and Resnick (2004) Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space
- Chandrasekaran et al (2017) You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech
- OPTIONAL: Chen, (2014) “The Laborers who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed” Wired.com