Welcome to the CTCS 677 Blog for Techno-Cultures!

This is the blog for CTCS 677 for the fall 2009 Techno-Cultures class.  We will use it to explore such questions as: "How do technologies shape our spatial, temporal and bodily perceptions?", “How does technology impact social organization and forms of community?”, "How are technology, labor and consumerism related?", "How are the workings of power manifested in technologies?", "What utopian (and dystopian) elements do cultural visions of technology employ?" "How have U.S. conceptions of difference, particularly racial difference, been bound up with dominant technologies?", and "Do digital media enable new ways of thinking and seeing?".

During the semester, you will be required to post at least 15 times to a class blog. At least five of these posts should be in the form of weekly reading responses (approximately 300-400 words). These responses should engage critically with the course materials for that day and should demonstrate both a grasp of the material and your own considered response to the same. Simply saying you liked or didn't like something or providing a straight summary of the readings is not sufficient; you should demonstrate careful, analytical thinking, engaging the materials but also moving beyond them. Feel free to draw on resources outside of the course as well, integrating them into your discussions and analyses, but these five posts need to engage the course materials at some level. These 5 responses should be posted by 6 p.m. on the evening before class. Your other 10 posts can take the form of responses to fellow students’ posts, replies to the “hands-on” homework prompts, technology fetishes, links to interesting sites on digital culture, etc. Ideally, the blog will become a communal space for the class, one used to address and ponder course themes and to point your peers to interesting materials. You are, of course, expected to read the blog regularly and are encouraged to post more frequently if the spirit moves you.