Syllabus, 21W.784 Becoming Digital:

Writing About Media Change, HASS-D, HASS-CI

Professor Aden Evens

TR11:00–12:30

Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies

http://web.mit.edu/21w.784/www/

aden@mit.edu
14N-316
617 324-1898
Room 14E-310

Office Hours: Tuesday 2–3, Thursday 12:30–1:30, or by appointment

Course Content

The computer and related technologies have invaded our daily lives, have changed the way we communicate, do business, gather information, entertain ourselves. Even technology once considered distinctly “modern”—photography, the telephone, movies, television—has been altered or replaced by faster and more dynamic media that allow more manipulation and control by the individual. Anyone can now create stunning photographic images without a processing lab; and film no longer earns its name, as the cinema often presents images that were never filmed to begin with, but created or doctored in the digital domain.  What are the consequences of these changes for the media and arts they alter?  How does digitizing affect the values, ethical and aesthetic, of images, texts, and sounds? How do these technologies change the way we spend our time and relate to other people? In the age of the digital, what becomes of property, of history, of identity? Through a series of careful comparisons of images, texts, movies, games, and music—pre-digital versus post-digital—this course will analyze the ways in which these media and our responses to them have changed in the digital era; and we will ask about the value of these changes.

Readings

William Mitchell, excerpt from The Reconfigured Eye

Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography”

Richard Spinello on Internet ethics

Jean Baudrillard, excerpt from Simulation and Simulacra

Mark Hansen, excerpt from New Philosophy for New Media

Friedrich Kittler, “There Is No Software”

Sherry Turkle, excerpt from Life On the Screen

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music”

Anne Balsamo, on gender and the computer

Christopher Douglas, “You Have Unleashed A Horde of Barbarians”

Ted Friedman, “Civilization and Its Discontents”

Philip K. Dick, “Minority Report”

Steven Spielberg, Minority Report (film showing)

 

Course Requirements

This course requires four essays, totaling about twenty-five pages. At least two of those four will be submitted once and then resubmitted with significant revision. Each of the four essays will require a somewhat different approach from the others, but in every case, the goal is good academic writing. Such writing identifies a problem or a question that demands investigation, and then articulates that problem as clearly as possible, pursuing every reasonable route to its resolution. The best problems do not disappear in their solutions, but reach their point of greatest articulation. By completing assignments preliminary to the culminating essay in each phase of the course, you will examine and rehearse the writing process. These assignments will encourage you to ask questions, to consider the assumptions and definitions that underlie a conflict, to analyze and argue.

In addition to the four essays, each student will make one graded presentation to the class of about five minutes. Presentations must be extemporaneous (delivered from notes but not read off the page), and will consist of a concise presentation of an argument from one of the essays. The grade includes evaluation of the style of the speech (clarity, diction, body language, persuasiveness, etc.), though the primary emphasis, as in the essays, will be on the originality and critical intensity of the argument.

Furthermore, to ensure active participation in class and to promote the practice of oral presentation skills, each student will be required to present to the class one time during the semester a brief summary of one of the readings for that day. This presentation serves to jumpstart discussion. It will not be graded independently, but it will receive feedback and will influence the “participation” grade for the student.

Class

Class meetings are an important part of the learning process for Becoming Digital. Please come to class ready to contribute. Much of what you learn in the course will occur to you in class discussions as you listen to each other’s ideas and enrich each other’s thought. Class is a joint endeavor, and in everything we do this semester your participation is essential. You have a responsibility not only to yourself but also to your classmates to show up for class, to show up on time, and to show up prepared. Class starts punctually at five minutes past the hour. If you’re more than ten minutes late to class, you’ll be counted absent.

Writing is extremely hard work; you must be willing to put in the necessary hours in and out of class, and you must be committed to a persistent critical examination of your own work. Ultimately, you are uniquely positioned to be your own best critic. As such, both in relation to your fellow students and in relation to your own improvement, your role in this class is more crucial to its success than is the instructor’s.

We will frequently examine student writing in class. If you write something as part of an assignment, but do not want it to be shown to the rest of the class, please include this request in a note accompanying your submission.

Conferences

Each student will have two mandatory conferences with the instructor, of about twenty minutes each. Conferences are an extension of class, and in conference we will discuss your essays and work together to improve them. You should come prepared to talk about the problems you’re having as you work on a particular essay and to offer possible solutions. I will listen and offer advice, but only if you seem to need it. The point, after all, is to learn to write well on your own. Don’t think of me as an editor or as someone who is going to “correct” your papers for you. Try to see me instead as someone who knows and understands the conventions you’re trying to learn and who would like to help you develop your own ideas.

Grades, Goals, and Criteria

The goal of this course is for you to engage an original idea in each of your essays, and to interest both yourself and your readers. Your essays should enlighten your readers and let them know why your essay is important—why what you have to say needs to be said. The whole semester is designed to develop techniques for creating such essays. It is an expectation of the course that your essays will be free of grammatical, spelling, and formatting errors. If you are to grapple with the difficult process of thinking in writing, I cannot afford to spend time reminding you of formal rules. Essays with significant grammatical, spelling, or formatting errors will be penalized.

The bulk of your grade comes from the four essays you write. They are weighted equally, each constituting twenty percent of your final grade. An additional ten percent of the grade comes from the required spoken presentation. The remaining ten percentage points are assigned to class participation—including at least one summary of the reading in front of the class—and the expert and careful completion of in-class and pre-draft assignments, including commentary on the work of your peers.

Good writing justifies itself: no general rule applies in every case, as thoughtful writing engenders its most appropriate form. As writers, therefore, we cannot rely on a checklist of rules to ensure that our writing is the best it can be. At most, we hope that the writing process itself, along with a constant commitment to excellence, will yield good writing. An author who takes up a problem that genuinely presses itself upon her and critically pursues it to the limits of her ability will likely produce excellent work. Nevertheless, there are a number of characteristics that the best writing tends to manifest, and these I will encourage in your work.

Typically, a good essay is a focused examination of a pressing problem. It provides appropriate and compelling evidence for its original conclusions. It includes no excess, making every word count and choosing the clearest exposition of its ideas and reasons. It considers every reasonable perspective, noting its own inadequacies. It takes account of its audience, offering explanations where requisite, and avoiding specialized jargon and unnecessary verbiage.

In spite of these guidelines, good writing is not formulaic, so that there can be no ultimately decisive criteria to determine the relationship between the essay and the grade. In general, an ‘A’ essay pursues an original problematic insight as thoroughly as possible, in compelling and beautiful prose. A ‘B’ essay may suffer from underdeveloped ideas, lack of focus, unnecessary excursions, awkward or inexact wording, or various other problems, but includes a strong sense of direction, the feeling of being “on to something.” A ‘C’ essay grasps at a problem but has not yet seized upon one, or is otherwise hampered by a glaring oversight, a lack of motivation, faulty logic, or a failure consistently to rise above the obvious. A ‘D’ or ‘F’ essay shows a profound lack of understanding or intellectual laziness. If you adhere to the requirements of the assignments, your grades will measure the strength of thought in your writing.

It is a minimum expectation that your essays will be free of grammatical, spelling, and formatting errors. Essays exhibiting such errors will be penalized. Mechanical perfection is not the goal of the course but, rather, its most basic expectation. The true goal is for you to express an original idea in an interesting, engaging way; your essays should both please and enlighten your readers and give them a sense of why your essay is important—why what you have to say needs to be said.

Deadlines

Deadlines in this course are generally firm. If you hand in a preliminary writing assignment after its due date and time, you will receive no feedback. If you hand in an essay draft after its due date and time, you will receive no feedback and forfeit your right to a conference. If the draft is to be peer edited, then your participation in class on that day will be impossible, and you will be marked absent. Revisions allow slightly more flexibility: during the semester you may have a three-day extension at your discretion on any one of your final essay submissions; please notify me that you plan to exercise this one-time option twelve hours in advance of the essay being due. The other three essays must be submitted on time or the essay grade will be penalized by a half-grade per day. If, due to a medical or family emergency, you cannot meet a deadline, please contact me as soon as possible so that we may work out an alternative schedule of due dates and times. Only medical emergencies qualify for penalty-free extensions (other than the one discretionary extension); extracurricular activities, challenging problem sets, and really tough physics exams do not qualify.

These policies, though seemingly severe, have two concrete benefits for everyone in the class:

(1) you may be less likely to fall behind if you know that your actions (and inactions) have real consequences, and (2) you can count on being treated the same as your classmates, which is another way of saying that no one will receive preferential treatment (by, for example, having immunity to overrun a deadline in order to work longer on a piece of writing).

Electronic Communication

Electronic communication, including the course website and e-mail, will be used to reduce the amount of paper and photocopying for this course. I’ll often use e-mail to relay administrative details and to hold in-class announcements to a minimum. Please check your e-mail daily. You are responsible for any information I pass along electronically. I will ask you to e-mail me certain assignments, including copies of both drafts and revisions for each essay. Some assignments will be submitted exclusively by e-mail. In general, longer assignments, including drafts and revisions, should be submitted as attachments (MS-Word-readable), while shorter assignments should be submitted in-line, in the body of the e-mail. I, too, will check my e-mail frequently. As this course concerns itself with the digital, the course website will play a role in presenting materials for class. The website is available at http://web.mit.edu/21w.784/www/.

 

Manuscript Forms

Writing assignments other than essays will usually be submitted electronically. Unless otherwise specified, you should e-mail the assignment inline, as part of your e-mail text, and not as an attachment. The subject line should include the assignment number (“P1.2”) and your name. (Of course, your name will also appear in the address field of the e-mail, but for reasons of bookkeeping, it is very helpful for me if you include your name in the subject line, as well.)

Essay manuscripts should be typewritten, double-spaced, etc. Single-space your name, the course title, my name, and the number of the essay (or draft) in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. Center your title about a third of the way down your first page, and begin your opening paragraph two double spaces beneath your title. Please do not underline your title or place it in quotation marks (except in special cases, such as a title that is a quotation). Number your pages, beginning on page two. You should use a twelve-point font, and margins of about an inch all the way around.

All essay assignments will be submitted as hardcopies. The paper copy is generally the one that I will grade and put comments on. In addition, you are also expected to send an electronic copy to me, as an attachment, with the assignment number (“Draft 2” or “Revision 2”) and your name in the subject line.

All drafts and revisions must be word-processed and thoroughly proofread for typographical, grammatical, and punctuation errors. If you consistently make these kinds of errors, your grade will drop.

You are required to keep a copy, electronic or otherwise, of every assignment. You are strongly encouraged to save your document frequently, back-up regularly, and print your work-in-progress periodically. Computer errors are inevitable and do not excuse shoddy, incomplete, or late work.

Following the guidelines will ensure that I can focus on your ideas and your prose when I read your essays, rather than devoting time to issues of formatting, pagination, and so on.

Attendance

I do not distinguish between excused and unexcused absences. Given the “hands-on” nature of the subject matter, to miss class is necessarily to miss out on the learning that this class provides.

There are two penalty-free absences that you should save for illness, religious reasons, job interviews, and the like. These absences are, for all practical purposes, “no questions asked,” so that you need present no excuse for missing class. Note: In the last two weeks of class (the final four meetings), the “no questions asked” policy is suspended; missed classes during these last two weeks require a medical excuse and a doctor’s note in order to count as a penalty-free absence. The third absence is no longer penalty free: it lowers your final course grade by a whole grade (e.g., an A becomes a B), the fourth lowers it another whole grade (the original A becomes a C).

The fifth absence means automatic failure for the course; you should drop the course immediately to avoid its showing up on your transcript. This automatic failure occurs regardless of your average or the reason for the absences because you will not have fulfilled the course requirements—no exceptions.

You must be on time for class. Class starts at 11:05am and ends at 12:30pm. If other classes or labs will necessitate your arriving late or leaving early, do not take this class this semester. Being more than ten minutes late or having to leave class early will count as an absence.

If you are absent on a day when you are responsible for part of class time (for example, you are giving a presentation, participating in a debate, or engaging in peer editing), you will likely receive a 0 for that assignment. This is unfortunate, but the busy schedules of your classmates do not allow for much post hoc shuffling.

Writing Center

If you’d like extra help on your essays in this or other classes, make an appointment at the Writing Center by logging onto its Web site: http://web.mit.edu/writing/. This superb service is located in the Stata Center, 32-081. Trained tutors will meet with you for about an hour. Call 617 253-3090 for information.

 

Schedule Summary

Unit One: Comparing Two Images (3 weeks)

Week 1

Introduction.

Week 2

Manovich versus Mitchell.

Essay 1 draft due.

Week 3

Workshop student essays.

Mandatory one-on-one conference with the instructor.

Unit Two: The Ethics of New Media (3 weeks)

Week 4

Newspaper articles on Internet ethics.

Essay 1 revision due.

Week 5

Essay 2 draft due.

Peer editing of Essay 2.

Week 6

Essay 2 revision due.

Oral presentations of ethical analysis from Essay 2.

Present your best idea from the paper.

Unit Three: The Culture of the Computer (3 weeks)

Week 7

Theoretical sources on digital culture.

Week 8

Essay 3 due.

Week 9

Mandatory one-on-one conference with the instructor.

Unit Four: Films and Games (3 weeks)

Week 10

Essay 3 revision due.

Film showing: The Minority Report

Week 11

Computer game analysis.

Week 12

Essay 4 due.

Wrap-up activities.