San Francisco State University

Multimedia Studies Program, Glenn Kurtz

Multimedia Theory and Criticism, Reading List, Spring 1997

I have browsed the web and made links to various web sites associated with the various subjects in the Spring '97 reading list.

• Entries in italics are reading materials from prior semesters.
• <entries in green and enclosed like this are additions of mine that seem to be related>
• The main links for the titles of each week's readings are links to a prior Multimedia Theory and Criticism project that existed as of 4/29/97.

Week 1: Medium and Message

Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (1873)

William Carlos Williams, "The Attic Which is Desire" (1930)

 

Week 2: What's New in New Media?

Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" (1964)

John Cage, "Experimental Music" (1957)

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (excerpt) (1900)

 

Week 3: What is "interactivity"?

Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text" (1976)

Theodor Holm Nelson, Literary Machines (1987) (excerpt)

Ellen Ullman, "Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life" (1995) (excerpt)

Jean Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media" (1985)

<Jean Baudrillard: Misc. Links>

<Kathleen Burnett, "Towards a Theory of Hypertextual Design">

 

Week 4: Should Learning be "fun"?

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (excerpts) (1985)

<Interview with Neil Postman>

Plato, Phaedrus (excerpt)

Neil Postman and Camille Paglia, "She Wants Her TV! He Wants His Book!" (Harpers, March 1991)

Plato, The Republic (excerpt)

 

Week 5: Playing with Bodies

Laura Miller, "Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier" (1995)

John Greenwald, "Barbie Boots Up" (Time, Nov. 11, 1996)

Vicki Haddock, "Messin' With Barbie" (SF Examiner, Jan. 12th, 1997)

Lynn Spigel, "Television in the Family Circle: The Popular Reception of a New Medium" (1990)

<Spigel, Lynn, and Denise Mann, eds. Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1992.>

Alice Laplante, "The Other Half" and "Close Up: How to be more sexy to women" (PC Week, March 21, 1994)

<Alice LaPlante, "Org Chart, Revisited", 04/29/96 >

Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play" (1966)

<Connie Zulkarnain, "Gender in Cyberspace: It's More than Meets the Eye" >

<Resisting the Virtual Life, Edited by James Brook and Iain A. Boal>

 

Week 6: Information and Advertising

Howard Besser, "From Internet to Information Superhighway" (1995)

<Impact of Networked Communications on Social Groupings, Moderated by Howard Besser, 1994>

Catherine P. Taylor, "Banner Year" (Wired, March 1997)

Hoffman and Novak, "Pushing Passive Eyeballs" (Wired, March 1997)

<Hoffman, Novak and Kalsbeek: Internet and Web Use in the United States>

<Donna L. Hoffman and Thomas P. Novak: Marketing in Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments: Conceptual Foundations>

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936)

Herbert I. Schiller, "Media, Technology, and the Market: The Interacting Dynamic" (1994)

<Herbert I. Schiller: Corporate-Driven Information Technologies>

Blaise Cendrars, "Advertising=Poetry" (1927)

<Patti Smith: ladies and gentleman blaise cendrars is not dead>

<Brooke Shelby Biggs: Read No Evil: Customized news filters may endanger community>

 

Week 7: Public Media and Private Interests

Alice Goldfarb Marquis, "Written on the Wind: The Impact of Radio" (1986)

Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1991)

 

Week 8: Decentralizing? Globalizing? Harmonizing? Empowering?

John Perry Barlow, Sven Birkerts, Kevin Kelly, Mark Slouka, "What Are We Doing On-Line?" (Harpers, August, 1995, 35-46)

Carl Mayer, Hans Janowitz, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1922)

Nicholas Negroponte, "An Age of Optimism" (1995)

<AMBUSH ON THE I-WAY: INFORMATION COMMODITIZATION ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER>

 

Appendix: Get Smart!

Steve Mann, "Smart Clothes" (1996)