Alchemical Musings

My doctoral program has an innovative alternative to traditional comprehensive exams.  Instead of reading 80+ books and spending a few days filling blue-books with essays, we can choose to 1. Publish a paper to a peer-reviewed academic journal, 2. Present a paper at an academic conference, and 3. Develop a syllabus.

I just defended my comps and am now officially ABD (wahoo!).  I hope to trade in those letters for a different 3, but in the meantime, here is the work I submitted to complete my MPhil:

• Jonah Bossewitch and Aram Sinnreich (July 23, 2012) The end of forgetting: Strategic agency beyond the panopticon New Media & Society 1461444812451565,doi:10.1177/1461444812451565 (proof)
• Bossewitch, Jonah (2011). Pediatric Bipolar and the Media of Madness, National Communications Association  11/09: Slides. Published in “Drugs and Media: New Perspectives On Communication Consumption and Consciousness”, eds. MacDougall, R. C., New York : Continuum: 2011. <website> (preprint)
• Digital Communications in Theory and Practice, Fall 2013: Syllabus

The syllabus was alot of work, but was definitely fun to work on. It came out of a mentorship I  worked on last year for a friend who was enrolled in Prescott college. He’s an activist and a close friend who wanted to learn more about this internet stuff…  We got a few weeks in, and Occupy erupted. But, someday I’ll teach this from start to finish.

Digital Communications in Theory and Practice

Prof. Jonah Bossewitch

Office Hours: By appointment

Course syllabus

Description

Like the telegraph and the railroad in their time, the Internet has been heralded as the promoter of equality, freedom, and democracy. And like the technologies that preceded it, its impact will ultimately derive from the ways we choose to use it.

What strategies are individuals, communities, and organizations developing to manage flows of information, maintain relationships, and organize collective action on the internet? How can we communicate more intentionally and purposefully? How can we be more deliberate in our choices around media consumption and production?

This course will explore new media and communication in both theory and practice. We will attempt to contextualize and historicize the digital revolution though the lenses of social and cultural theory, architecture, popular culture, and a simultaneous immersion in cultures of use. We will study and encounter how software embedded in communities of practice traces the social fabric of the networked age. Our inquiry will be guided and informed by a hands-on immersion into the fields are studying.

Objectives

This course is designed to help you improve your critical judgment around media and communications platforms and practices. Through a combination of direct engagement and reflection, you will learn to make more informed ethical and aesthetic choices in your media and communications diet, and learn to better critique the hype around emerging technologies. You will feel confident critically engaging with mainstream Internet pundits and become more comfortable engaging in the jargon-filled discourse around new media.

By the end of the course you will have a greater understanding of what software is and how/why it is created, and you will have also gained experience with a variety of collaboration tools, such as issue trackers, wikis, blogs, tagging, and RSS. We will be working closely with the technologies we will be studying, in order to develop perspectives grounded in experience, and throughout the semester we will be helping each other connect theory to practice, and vice versa.

Filed by Jonah at 11:28 pm under earth,education,epistemology
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This weekend I participated in a wonderful academic experiment – a conference hosted by the Rutgers Media/Comm program called Extending Play. Thanks to everyone who was involved in making it happen!

The conference invited participants to play with traditional academic conferences, in form and content, and to a large extent, they succeeded. I had a stupid busy weekend, and couldn’t attend as much of this event as I wanted to, but I was there all day on Saturday, and the keynote conversations were refreshingly engaging,  and many of the panelists pushed the boundaries of conventional conference formats.

I’m hoping to circle back and write more reflections about the parts of the conference I attended, but in this post, I want to share my presentation. (It was a difficult presentation for me to make, given the tragedy in Boston last week… but, I think it was appropriate).

What impacts might Free and Open Source technologies have on networked insurgency tactics? How might 3D-printing, open source drones, open source rocket guidance software, and arduinos transform urban guerrilla warfare and pose a serious threat to (inter)national security? While these technologies are typically used for hobbies and play in the western world, their weaponization is an discussion whose ethical urgency needs to be taken up by communities of practice.

The tactics of networked insurgents are evolving at the speed of the internet, and FLOSS communities need to start thinking about strategies to anticipate, and prevent the weaponization of their software. Is the weaponization of FLOSS software intended in Stallman’s software freedoms?  While a minority of free software licenses attempt to prevent violent applications of their software, how should the average software developer think about their responsibilities towards the potential uses of their creations?

Filed by Jonah at 10:40 pm under ethics,fire
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