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Readings and topics by date: January: 7 | 9 | 10 | 14 | 16 | 17 | 23 | 24 | 28 | 30 | 31 | February: 4 | 6 | 7 | 11 | 13 | 14 | 20 | 21 | 25 | 27 | 28 | March: 11 | 13 | 14 | 18 | 20 | 21 | 25 | 27 | 28 | April: 1 | 3 | 4 | 8 | 10 | 11 | 17 |

SOCL 4528 Computers and Society Syllabus

Northeastern University, Spring 2013, CRN 30623
Professor: Judith A. Perrolle (perrolle@ccs.neu.edu)
Office: 541 Holmes
Phone: (617) 373-3861
Office Hours: W 1:30-3:30pm and by appointment

Teaching Assistant: Kevin Geyer
Email: geyer.k AT husky.neu.edu
Office: 532 Holmes
Phone: (617) 373-2329
Office Hours: M & Th 2:30-4:00

Class meets sequence 5: M, W, Th 4:35-5:40 in room 135 Shillman Hall

Course Description

Assignments and Due Dates

Essays are based on the assigned readings and class discussions. They will also require additional online sources found through the class bookmarks or by searching. You must cite your sources (including the urls and date retrieved for information found online). Grades will also be based on your ability to write a logically organized essay supporting your own ideas with facts and analysis. The ability to recognize the positions of major stakeholders, present multiple points of view and show that you understand the key points of arguments other than your own are also necessary for a good grade. Each essay should be between four and eight double spaced pages. Students are expected to exercise some judgment about the probable accuracy of sources on the web. If in doubt, ask. Some recommended sources have been bookmarked. When using slashdot, Wikipedia, blogs, or other online sources try to find out where the original information came from. When giving the definitions of sociological terms try the class glossary, not an online dictionary of English. Northeastern University expects students to abide by the NU Academic Integrity Policy and to participate in the TRACE course evaluation survey at the end of the semester.

Topics and Readings

Assigned readings are available online. Temporary backup copies (often at lower resolutions or missing images and other parts) will be available in the class cache in case the webserver for the reading becomes unavailable. These files are viewable only by members of the class and require your myNEU username and password. The Communications of the ACM and other online journals are available to the Northeastern University community through the Library's NUCat portal.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed for the class bookmarks. Bookmarks will generally refer to information on topics that will be used in lectures. You can access subsets of bookmarks with specific tags to use as sources for essays and group presentations. The twitter link is for cancellations and other class spam. It is rarely used.

Part 1. Introduction: Computer Ethics

M Jan 7 Topic: Ethics and Professional Ethics ( ethics bookmarks) ( subscribe)

Professional codes of ethics are more specific than moral philosophies. They contain statements of responsibilities to clients and the public. Besides being an expression of the moral views of their members, professional codes of ethics serve as a statement about a profession's responsibility to avoid doing harm in the wider society. This contributes to building the trust that leads society to allow professional groups to regulate themselves.
Read:

• Association for Computing Machinery Code of Ethics OR American Sociological Association Code of Ethics
• The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

W Jan 9 Topic: Morality and Design (design bookmarks) ( subscribe)
Read:

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation's August 2000 Statement on Ethics and People In: Architecture Is Policy ( cached copy requires login).
• Judith A. Perrolle, Morality, Privacy, and Interface Design

Part 2. Computer Mediated Social Structure

Th Jan 10 Topic: Introduction to Social Structure ( bookmarks)
Concepts: The basic unit of social structure is the social interaction. Repeated patterns of social interaction build larger elements of social structure: roles, groups, organizations, communities, and social institutions.
Read:

• In Judith Perrolle, Computers and Social Change Section 1.2.3 Social Structure, and Section 1.2.4 Institutions
• danah boyd, Designing for Social Norms (or How Not to Create Angry Mobs)

M Jan 14 Topic: Computer-Mediated Social Interaction ( bookmarks) ( subscribe to this topic)
Read:

• Section 3: How the internet is used in groups p. 22-29 and Section 4: The impact of the internet on group activities p. 30-37 in Lee Rainie, Kristen Purcell, and Aaron Smith, The Social Side of the Internet, PEW Internet & American Life Project, 2011
• Mizuko Ito, et al. Major Findings Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project ( cached copy requires login)
• Mark Chen (2009) Visualization of Expert Chat Development in a World of Warcraft Player Group, E-Learning and Digital Media, 6(1), 54-70.

W Jan 16 Topic: Power ( bookmarks) ( subscribe to this topic)
Concepts: The social theorist Max Weber defined power as the ability to get someone else to do what you want them to, even against their will. Power is exercised in society through social interaction. When that interaction is mediated by technology, the way in which power is exercised may change as well. Weber distinguished among normative, economic, coercive forms of power.
Read:

• Notes on Power (Read main page and follow first level links.)
• In Judith Perrolle, Computers and Social Change Section 1.2.2.1 Information and Power in Social Interactions and Section 2.2.2.3 Max Weber: Rationality and Power
• Bruce Etling, Robert Faris and John Palfrey, Political Change in the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing, SAIS Review, Summer-Fall 2010 ( cached copy requires login)
• Evgeny Morozov, Why the Internet Is a Great Tool for Totalitarians Wired January 2010

• Stanley Milgram's study of Obedience
• Phil Zimbardo's Prison Experiment
• Part 1 and Part 2 of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech

Th Jan 17 Topic: Social Control ( bookmarks) ( subscribe to this topic)
Concepts: Social control works best when the application of power is seen as legitimate. Although "illegal operations" are not really against the law, the embedding of rules, regulations, norms, values, and laws into software tends to blur the distinctions among them.
Read:

• Gary T. Marx Technology and Social Control: The Search for the Illusive Silver Bullet Continues forthcoming in Encyclopedia of Social Theory ( cached copy requires login)
• Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, Robert Faris, Jillian York, and John Palfrey, The Evolving Landscape of Internet Control ( cached copy requires login)
• Center for Democracy and Technolgy Making Sense of the WCIT: It’s Complicated!
• Excerpt from the preface to Larry Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ( cached copy requires login)
• Bruce Schneier Building in Surveillance. ( cached copy requires login)

• CDT Analyses of Key ITU Proposals
• Larry Lessig's Code version 2.0
and Technology and Social Control: The Search for the Illusive Silver Bullet In the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2001 ( cached copy requires login)
• Wikipedia Social Control and The Three Types of Legitimate Rule
• Delicious bookmarks tagged surveillance
• Delicious bookmarks tagged gatekeeper

Monday January 21 is Dr. Martin Luther King Birthday holiday

W Jan 23 Topic: Identity ( bookmarks) ( subscribe to this topic)
Concepts: identity, frontstage, backstage, openID
Read or View:

• Adam Barnhart, Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ( cached copy requires login)
• danah boyd, "Real Names" Policies Are an Abuse of Power
• The PEW Internet & American Life Project's survey on Reputation Management ( cached copy requires login)
• Dick Hardt Identity 2.0. Also on YouTube. (cached copy requires login)
• Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity in Brief. (cached copy requires login)

Th Jan 24 Topic: Privacy ( bookmarks) ( subscribe to this topic)
Concepts: privacy
Read:

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article on Privacy ( cached copy requires login)
• Bruce Schneier, The Myth of the 'Transparent Society' ( cached copy requires login)
• danah boyd, "Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence" (2008). Convergence, 14 (1) ( cached copy requires login)
• Center for Democracy and Technology, Privacy Principles for Identity in the Digital Age ( cached copy requires login)

M Jan 28 Topic: Social Networks ( bookmarks) ( subscribe to this topic)
Essay 1 due date postponed until Feb 4.
Concepts: Although some people believe that people were isolated from one another before the internet, the human species is linked into a dense social interaction network that spans our planet in a way that makes each of us no more that 6 social interactions away from any other person. Social networks are characterized by weak ties and strong ties. They are able to mobilize social capital, the collective resources of their members.
Read:

• Mark Granovetter, Introduction (pages 201-203) to The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited in Sociological Theory, Volume 1 (1983), 201-233 ( cached copy requires login)
• Wikipedia article on Social Capital (cached copy requires login)
• Keith Hampton, Lauren Sessions, Eun Ja Her, and Lee Rainie Social Isolation and New Technology, PEW Internet & American Life Project, Nov 4, 2009 ( cached copy requires login)
• Ellison, N.B., Steinfield, C. & Lampe, C. (2011). Connection Strategies: Social capital implications of Facebook-enabled communication practices. New Media & Society. ( cached copy requires login)

W Jan 30Topic: Privacy and Identity in Social Media Groups meet to work on Group Assignment 1.

Th Jan 31 Topic: Social Media and Social Change
Read:

• Julie Cohen, Imagining the Networked Information Society, Chapter 1 in " Configuring the Networked Self", Yale University Press, 2012. ( cached copy requires login)
• Chapter 1 in Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks ( cached copy requires login)

M Feb 4 Topic: Information ( bookmarks) ( subscribe to this topic)
Concepts: We will be using the mathematician Norbert Weiner's cybernetics theory of information.
Essay 1 due today.
Read:

• Notes on Information (read main page and browse links for extra reading)
• In Judith Perrolle Computers and Social Change: Section 1.1 Information
• Overview of the PEW Internet and American Life Project's report Information Searches That Solve Problems ( cached copy requires login)

( bookmarks)

• Wikipedia articles on the Thomas theorem and definition of the situation ( cached copy requires login)
• in Computers and Social Change Section 2.1.3 A Model of Information and Tools in Social Change
• pages 51-55 and 59-61 of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1966) ( cached copy requires login)
• Forgetting the Moon
• NORAD Moon Attak

( bookmarks)

• Notes on Formal and Informal Knowledge
• Edward Tufte, Introduction and Powerpoint Does Rocket Science from The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint ( cached copy requires login)
• U.S. Officer In Afghanistan Mows Down PowerPoint Rangers (the slide) ( cached copy requires login)
• Michael Alley, Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides: The Assertion-Evidence Structure

• Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, 32 pages
• Report of Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Volume I, Chapter 7: The Accident's Organizational Causes

M Feb 11Topic: Formal and Informal Knowledge in Bureaucratic and Informal Organizations ( bookmarks) ( subscribe to this topic)
Concepts: bureaucracy, organization, knowledge, open source, rationalization
Read:

• In Judith Perrolle, Computers and Social Change: Section 8.3: Rationalizing Professional and Technical Work
• Introduction and Conclusions in Christian Bird, David Pattison, Raissa D'Souza, Vladimir Filkov and Premkumar Devanbu Latent Social Structure in Open Source Projects (SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering, Nov. 2008) ( cached copy requires login).
• Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

W Feb 13Topic: Standards ( bookmarks) ( subscribe to this topic)
Concepts: standard, vendor lock-in (( bookmarks)
Read:

• Notes on Standards
• David A. Balto, Standard Setting in a Network Economy ( cached copy requires login)
• Laura DeNardis and Eric Tam Open Documents and Democracy ( cached copy requires login)

Part 3. The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age

• Garret HardenThe Tragedy of the Common ( cached copy requires login)
• Preface: Comprised of at Least Jelly? and Chapter 10: An Environmentalism for Information from James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, Yale University Press, 2008. ( cached copy requires login)

( bookmarks)

( subscribe to this topic)

• Executive Summary of The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age , by the National Research Council. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000. ( cached copy requires login)
• Gary T. Marx, Censorship and Secrecy, Social and Legal Perspectives International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2001. ( cached copy requires login)

• Creative Commons
• The Internet Archive
• The Open Content Alliance
• Wikipedia
• Open Courseware Consortium

Th Feb 21 Topic: Contracts, ( bookmarks) ( subscribe), Treaties, ( bookmarks) ( subscribe) and Licenses

( bookmarks) ( subscribe)

• Electronic Frontier Foundation, Dangerous Terms: A User's Guide to EULAs ( cached copy requires login)
• U. S. Copyright Office's work for hire bulletin ( cached copy requires login)

M Feb 25 Topic: Censoring the Web with Trademarks ( bookmarks) ( subscribe) and Trade Secrets ( bookmarks) ( subscribe)
Concepts: trademark, trade secret, censorship
Read:

• Introduction to the Trademark FAQ
• Introduction to the Trade Secret FAQ
• Introduction to the Domain Names and Trademarks FAQ

( bookmarks)

( subscribe)

• Introduction to the Patent FAQ
• US Patent and Trademark Office's Peer to Patent project
• Mark A. Lemley, Michael Risch, Ted Sichelman & R. Polk Wagner, Life After Bilski , Stanford Law Review, Volume 63, Issue 6 - June 2011. ( cached copy requires login)
• James Boyle, What intellectual property law should learn from software ( cached copy requires login)

Th Feb 28 Topic: Copyrights ( bookmarks)

( subscribe)

• Larry Lessig's presentation to OSCON 2002, Free Culture (cached copy requires login).
• The American Assembly, Copy Culture: Infringement and Enforcement in the U.S.
• Introduction to the Copyright FAQ
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act Executive Summary ( cached copy requires login).

( subscribe)

( subscribe)

• Electronic Frontier Foundation, Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years under the DMCA ( cached copy requires login).
• additional readings to be added

• Jonathan Zittrain, Tethered Appliances, Software as Service, and Perfect Enforcement, Chapter 5 in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It ( cached copy requires login).

W Mar 13 Topic: Fair Use ( bookmarks) ( subscribe)
Concept: fair use
Read:

• U. S. Copyright Office's fair use webpage
• Introduction to the Fair Use FAQ
• Conclusions and Recommendations from U. S. Copyright Office's Report on Orphan Works ( cached copy requires login).
• Stanford Center for Internet and Society's Library of Congress: Fair Use Lets You Jailbreak Your iPhone
• Google book search settlement

Part 4. Ethical Issues in Computer and Communications Design

Readings for Part 4 will be revised.

Th Mar 14Topic: Designing for Accessibility ( bookmarks) ( subscribe)
Read: Accessible Web Page Design

M Mar 18 Topic: Designing for Democracy ( bookmarks) ( subscribe) Recommended Reading: Gary T. Marx, The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: Totalitarian Potentials Within Democratic Structures from The Social Fabric James E. Short, Jr., ed. Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA. 1986 ( cached copy requires login) The U. S. Bill of Rights Doug Schuler, Computer Professionals and the Next Culture of Democracy, Communications of the ACM, January, 2001 ( cached copy requires login) Browse: Ed Felten's blog Freedom to Tinker Black Box Voting Hacking Democracy voting bookmarks

W Mar 20 Topic: Designing for Safety ( bookmarks) ( subscribe)
Read:

• Paul Slovic Perception of Risk (requires login to NU library) ( cached copy requires login).
• Edsger Dijkstra, The End of Computing Science? from Communications of the ACM Vol. 44, No. 3, March 2001, page 92 Alternate source: handwritten PDF version ( cached copy requires login).
• Sarah Underwood Improving Disaster Management from Communications of the ACM Volume 53 ,  Issue 2  (February 2010) ( cached copy requires login).
• Clinton M. Jenkin, Risk Perception and Terrorism: Applying the Psychometric Paradigm, Homeland Security Affairs, Volume II No. 2: July 2006

Th Mar 21 Topic: The balance Between Civil Liberties and Secure Flight ( bookmarks) ( subscribe) Read: Bruce Schneier, The War on the Unexpected ( cached copy requires login). Wikipedia, No Fly List ( cached copy requires login). Electronic Privacy Information Center, Air Travel Privacy ( cached copy requires login). Electronic Privacy Information Center, Whole Body Imaging Technology ( cached copy requires login).

( bookmarks)

( subscribe)