9:00 - 10:50 a.m. Wednesdays
G24 Foreign Languages Building

NOTE: 8-week-course: meets 19-Jan-10 to 12-Mar-10 only. Focuses on New Media, Culture, and Society (see MS 326), but with a focus on small group discussion with students and additional course content on contemporary digital and Internet culture such as twitter, viral marketing, memes, virtual worlds, and social media.  For undergraduates only.

This is a special 8-week (half-semester) course.  It will only be taught once.

INSTRUCTORS

Julian Dibbell

Julian Dibbell is George A. Miller Visiting Professor during Spring 2010.  He is an internationally-recognized author, speaker, and technology journalist who specializes in information technology. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde (Paris), Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil), TIME, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Details, The Independent (London), The Daily Telegraph (London), The Nation, and in many other publications. It has been anthologized in venues such as Best American Science Writing (2002) and The Best of Technology Writing (2007, 2008, 2009). His 1993 article for the Village Voice, "A Rape in Cyberspace" is the most-cited, reprinted, and assigned essay ever written on identity and the Internet. He is the author of the books My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (1999), and Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot (2006). He has published books, essays, and articles on virtual worlds, social media, online communities, hackers, bloggers, music pirates, computer viruses, encryption technologies, and the heady cultural, political, and philosophical questions that tie these and other digital-age phenomena together. He is a contributing editor for Wired magazine and a non-resident fellow of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. In 2004 he co-founded the game research collective Terra Nova.

Lisa Nakamura

Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, PMLA, Cinema Journal, The Women's Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is working on a new monograph on Massively Multiplayer Online Role playing games, the transnational racialized labor, and avatarial capital in a "postracial" world.