internet

After several years as an administrator and then on my first sabbatical since 1995, I am returning to teaching in the Spring. One of my courses is called "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" and is an introduction to the deep structure of thinking in the information age. I thought HASTAC readers might be interested in seeing my course description.

Is the True Story of the Internet the idealistic open access "Information Wants to be Free" version of the W3C, Tim Berners-Lee, and the most creative digital youth today? Or is the True Story of the Internet the overnight success of twenty-two year old billionaires who turn all that user-generated content, all the information data-mined from social networking sites, and all those social graphs of interconnections (the social interconnections of Facebook friends graphed the world over) into a vc'd globally-extended business with new targeted forms of advertising, coercion, and (always) ever new and fancier toys--higher speed, better definition, more customizable, better looking, Kanye West/Daft Punk's harder, better, faster, stronger?

Gripping . . .Informative . . . Smart . . . Nothing superfluous in Download, the Discovery Channel's four-part history of the internet. Journalist John Heilemann makes "algorithm" sound like "aphrodisiac." In Silicon Valley, it is.

My trip to Madeira was a lot like my leave, low expectations and quietly, immeasurably pleasurable. That's the moral of the story: the circumference has to be small for the experience to be deep.

Here is a reblog from The Seattle Times of an important op ed piece on "net neutrality" and risks to freedom of expression by Michael Connor and Franum Brown