Textbooks for Fall 2012 New Technologies Class
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With the fall semester coming up less than two months away, I had to order the textbooks for my New Technologies class at CUNY Queens College.
The required readings for the course are…
- Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
- Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. PublicAffairs, 2011.
- Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin, 2011.
- Raymond, Eric. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, n.d. http://catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar/.
- Rushkoff, Douglas. Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. First ed. New York: OR Books, 2010.
- Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: Penguin, 2011.
- Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
- Vonderau, Patrick. The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009.
- Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Alfred A. Knoppf, 2010.
I have kept most of the books from the Fall 2011 class but abandoned the textbooks in favor of creating an environment closer to that of a graduate seminar. To do that, I selected books that make specific and compelling arguments about contemporary digital media. I tried that last year, and we had some brilliant and engaging conversations. If I have to do any remedial explanations of how specific technologies work, such as explaining how the web works, I’ll do that in class as a lecture.
Although the book list might appear long (and expensive), these books are pretty easy read, and it is very easy to procure these books for a reasonable price on the used market. Students with ereaders can get every title for an average price of $10 each.
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