Due April 19, 2016

The project in brief is to begin to reconfigure each student’s relationship to technology. One of the overarching agendas of most sociology professors is to cultivate in their students a sociological perspective, a point of view that keeps the bearer mindful of the impact of the social on the individual. People who can take a sociological perspective recognize that history affects biography, and that while we have free will, our options are nonetheless constrained by social structure and culture. People with a sociological perspective see themselves in a contingent social milieu and know that things might have gone some other way. For the purposes of this class, the place of technology in all of that is especially important  How does technology, one enormous aspect of our culture, enable and constrain us? One especially interesting question for sociologists of technology here in the early 21st century has to do with the consequences of extremely complex, extended technology on individuals’ world views. Does it matter that most of us don’t know how to make the common artifacts that fill our lives? Does it matter that we do not commonly recognize the pervasiveness of technologized approaches to living?

To gain some traction on such questions, each student in the class will undertake one big project and then share his/her findings with the rest of the class. You have two options.

Option One: Build Something and Show Us

Here, the idea is to fabricate some technology, as much from scratch as reasonably possible. My guess is that for many of you, this will prove more challenging than you originally suspected! The right kind of technology is something that is fairly common, but that is not commonly made by individual users, or alternatively something that seems hilariously old fashioned but was culturally central and made by lots of people not so long ago. A surprisingly large number of technologies fit the bill. Here are a few possibilities:
radio
tallow candle
personal computer
fire making drill
wooden or bone flute
telegraph
solar panel
spear and atlatl
lye soap
diode or capacitor or transistor
stone arrowhead or axe
electric motor
paper
abacus
camera
wheeled something or other, like a wheelbarrow maybe, with a…wait for it…reinvented wheel
cotton thread
charcoal
leather
loudspeaker or microphone
rope
clock escapement
concrete
loom
fire hardened mud bricks (cob)
high fructose corn syrup
kiln cured clay jar

These are not the only possibilities, just some that occurred to me here while I was typing. Pick one of these, or come up with one of your own (but clear your choice with me ahead of time in any event).

Obviously, the degree to which it is possible to build from scratch varies a lot depending on what you’re making. If you build a pc, I don’t expect you to mine your own bauxite for gallium. But if you’re making paper, it should not be made out of other paper.

Also, Keep notes and when appropriate take pictures along the way. When you have it done, you will make a presentation of five minutes or so to the class, showing off your artifact, describing what you did, maybe showing us a few pictures, telling us what was harder than you expected and what was easier, and generally addressing themes we’ve been discussing in class as your project further illuminates them. Tell us the rough range of dates during which your technology was current, and also how much was simply impractical to collect or make yourself. We’re going to watch for a pattern across all the projects. Also, as we will be discussing in class, we are interested in the possible relationship between knowledge or ignorance of technology on the one hand, and levels of efficacy and apathy on the other. Prepare your comments accordingly.

Higher grades will go to those who do the most building themselves, without getting help from kits or store bought parts more than necessary. Higher grades will go to those who can explain how their experience with their project informs their understanding of their own predicament as 21st century central Texans.

Option Two: Read Something and Tell Us

Here, the idea is to read a book that is directly or indirectly related to our study of technology and society. In some cases the book will be so directly related to our course that we could have assigned it as a text. In other cases (and these may prove to be the most interesting), the book will at first seem unrelated to our subject matter but will prove on careful analysis to be amazingly relevant. A surprisingly large number of titles fit the bill. Here are a few possibilities:
Eggers, The Circle
Turkle, Alone Together
Darwin, The Origin of Species
Lim, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency
Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype
Blackmore, The Meme Machine
Gibson, The Peripheral
Thwaite, The Toaster Project
Pena, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender…
Cline, Ready Player One
Martin, Understanding Terrorism
Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Huxley, Brave New World
Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
Ritzer, McDonaldization
Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Cowan, A Social History of American Technology
Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs
Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature
Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things
Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Durkheim, The Division of Labor
Latour, Aramis
Anderson, Imagined Communities
Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Diamond, Guns, Germs, & Steel
Gore, The Assault on Reason
Baron, Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World
Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World…
Bauerline, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupifies…
Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, just a few on my shelf, the titles of which I could read from my chair, that seemed like they might provoke useful insights regarding the character of, and our relationship to, contemporary sociotechnical systems. Pick one of these, or another book by one of these authors, or another book with a similar theme by another author, or something else entirely (but clear your choice with me ahead of time in any event).

Once you’ve read your book, you will write a really careful, five page double spaced analysis in which you will discuss the major themes, strengths, and weaknesses of the book with respect to themes we’ve been discussing in class. Let me be very clear here: instant F grade for any paper that fails to talk mostly about the explicit connections of the book to our class. Then you will give a presentation of five minutes or so to the rest of the class, giving us a few highlights. Higher grades will go to those who best meet every criteria just indicated. Higher grades will go to those who write best and most cleanly.

About the grading, whether you do build a thing or read a book…

All students need to use PowerPoint or some other presentation software in their presentations on April 19, and students need to email those presentation files to me by no later than class time April 19. A big part of your grade is the presentation of your artifact or book. Grades will be mostly a function of the degree to which projects:
– are as homemade as reasonably possible (this applies to artifacts, not books, obviously),
– show effort consistent with a 100 point project,
– include presentations that are carefully planned and useful to classmates, and
– include presentations that connect to themes from class.