Public Policy and the Internet

Course Syllabus

The Internet as Paradigm In this class session we will look at some of the ways in which the Internet is viewed as a paradigm of organization, change, knowledge and structure. Assigned Readings Lawrence Lessig, Code, version 2.0, chapters 1-6 Esther Dyson, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler, et. al., "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" at http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fi1.2magnacarta.html. "The Network Paradigm: Social Formations in the Age of Information," by Felix Stalder, The Information Society (a summary of Manuel Castell's trilogy, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (1996, 1997 and 1998).) At http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/readers/full-text/14-4%20Stalder.html. Declaration of Digital Democracy, Center for Digital Democracy, June 2000, at http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/decDigitalDemocracy.html. "Cyberspace is a Parallel World: A Metaphor Analysis," by James Q. Jacobs, 1999, at http://www.jqjacobs.net/anthro/metaphor.html. "The Age of Social Transformation," by Peter Drucker, The Atlantic Monthly, November 1994. On E-res in PDF format.   Further, Optional Reading Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, Vintage Books, 1995 Richard E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology, Guilford Press, 1995 Manual Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I, 1996 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. II, 1997 Manuel Castells, The End of the Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. III, 1998. Doug Schuler and Peter Day, eds., Shaping the Network Society: The New Role of Civil Society in Cyberspace, MIT Press, 2004. Cass Sunstein, republic.com, Princeton University Press, 2001. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Portfolio, 2006.

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