English 236
Notes B for Class 16
This page contains materials intended only to facilitate class
discussion (excerpts from online reading materials, outlines of issues, links
to resources that may be mentioned in class, etc.). The materials are not the
same as the instructor's notes for the class and are thus not designed to represent
the full exposition or logic of the class. Materials are subject to revision as
the instructor finalizes preparation for the relevant class. (These notes last
revised 1/8/00)
- The Mainframe Paradigm
- The Networking/Personal Computing Paradigm
- The "World Picture" of Information (The
Interface from the Mainframe to the Network)
1. The Mainframe
Paradigm Late 1950's to late 1970's (Shoshanna Zuboff: the "informating"
era) (from Class 12 notes)
Representations in the arts, humanities, cultural studies:
- Colossus:
The Forbin Project (1969)
- Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge:
Polity, 1995), p. 86: "The population is now cognizant of being surveilled
constantly by databases and it apparently feels ill at ease as a result. Database
anxiety has not of yet developed into an issue of national political prominence
but it is clearly a growing concern of many and bespeaks a new level of what
Foucault calls the normalization of the population" (Poster is discussing
the database as "super-panopticon")
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979)
- Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (Edinburgh:
William Tait, 1843) (on the Panopticon)
- Other Works Mentioned in Class: C. Wright Mills, White
Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: 1951; rpt. Galaxy, 1956);
Willam H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1956)
2. The Networking/Personal
Computing Paradigm Late 1970's to Present (from
Class 12 notes)
Additional References:
- from Alan Liu, Ultrabasic Guide to the Internet
for Humanities Users at UCSB (Santa Barbara, CA: UCSB Bookstore, 1994)
(p. 52: visualization of the Internet
- Stuart Moulthrop, "Map"
of Shadow of an Informand
3.The "World Picture"
of Information (The Interface from the Mainframe to the Network)
- Martin Heidegger (from Druckrey), p. 56
- Shoshana Zuboff, 1, 2,
3
- Albert Borgman, p. 173 (See http://ftp.cs.umt.edu/DOE/home.html
and http://www.cs.umt.edu/cgi-bin/imgsht.cgi?/DX/DXIMAG/BASE?/DX/DXIMAG/THUMB
- Medscape (http://www.medscape.com/),
Medical Images (http://www.medscape.com/Home/Search/formImages.html)
- Visualization
of 3D MRI Human Head Data (Clint Potter, National Center for Supercomputing
Applications)
- Matt Kirschenbaum, from , "A
White Paper on Information" (1998): "Here I want to argue
that graphic design is actually possessed of a deeper and much more specific
import for critical observers of the new media: that it is in fact the single
most important arena in which the public learns to recognize the look and
feel of information qua information. . . . So electronic media, I am arguing,
assume material form through the models and renderings and visualizations
that we create to interact with it in various information states. This interaction
occurs at the immediate phenomenological level of the user interface, and
it is here that the visual materiality of information has the potential to
become aestheticized–even radically aestheticized. . . ."
- Shoshana Zuboff, 4
