I’ve just posted the syllabus for my graduate reading course on technology and society
that I’ll be leading this fall; it was developed with the help of Dima Epstein and Erik Nisbet, and aims to visit the foundational work in Sociology and Communication that tackles the relationship between technology and society. Some people asked that I post it to the blog; here you go. It’s also available here, neatly formatted. Comments are very welcome.

independent graduate reading course:
“Foundations in the Study of Technology and Society”
Fall 2007
Prof. Tarleton Gillespie

Much of the contemporary literature dealing with information technologies, new media, and digital culture either overlook or oversimplify the complexity of technology as a social phenomenon. It is often remarkably ahistorical as well, as if the examination of communication technologies began alongside the arrival of the Web. For those of us who deal with information and communication technologies in our own work, the various demands of our research projects rarely allow us the chance to revisit the traditions that produced these areas of study. This semester we aim to rectify that. This reading course will explore some of the foundational works in Sociology and Communication that aim to understand the relationship between technology and society. We will generally read one scholar per week, in order to read them deeply. In our meetings we will discuss the readings on their own, and then try to identify what they might offer to the current literature on new technology and society. The outcome will certainly be a better understanding of this area, and a rich set of theoretical tools we can each bring to our own research.

Week one: Aug 27-31
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination: excerpt from introduction [1959]
Martin Heidegger “The Question Concerning Technology” [1977]
Carl Mitcham, “Types of Technology” Research in Philosophy & Technology v1 [1978]
Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept” Social Research 64.3 [1997]

Week two: Sept 3-7
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology [1925/1978]: 3-62
Max Weber, Essays in Economic Sociology [1924/1999] (Richard Swedberg, ed.) 41-115, 155-178
Max Weber, “The Bureaucratic Machine”

Week three: Sept 10-14
John Dewey, The Public and its Problems [1927]: 1-184
John Dewey, “What I Believe,” in Collected Works

Week four: Sept 16-21
Karl Marx, “Ch 1: Commodities” and “Ch 14: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” in Capital, Vol. One [1867] (125-177, 492-587)
Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process” in Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things [1986]: 64-94

Week five: Sept 24-28
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization [1934]: 3-106, 321-446 [available as e-book]

Week six: Oct 1-5
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society [1954/1964]: 3-22, 64-162, 319-343, 412-436
Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor [1986] 3-120

Oct 8-12 - Fall Break…

Week seven: Oct 15-19
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society [1984] xiii-xxxvii, 1-40, 162-280

Week eight: Oct 22-26
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication [1951]: 3-142, 156-198
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media [1961]: 3-61

Week nine: Oct 29-Nov 2
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form [1974]: 1-157 (all)

Week ten: Nov 5-9
James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society [1982]: 13-36, 113-230

Week eleven: Nov 12-16
James Beniger, The Control Revolution [1986]: 1-30, 291-438 [available as e-book]
Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish [1977]: 195-217

Week twelve: Nov 19-23 [Thanksgiving]
Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New [1988]: 1-231 (all)

Week thirteen: Nov 26-30
Judy Wacjman, Feminism Confronts Technology [1991]: 1-167 (all)

Week fourteen: Dec 3-7 [note: after classes end]
Thomas Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture [2004]: 1-174 (all)