Gender and Genre
in Computer-Mediated Communication

Part I

Objective

Be aware of diversity

Description

In this course we explore the place of personnae in Computer-Mediated Communication. We will focus upon how gender is marked or is not marked as well as where and when this happens in the following venues: Talkers, WWW Chat, Discussion Lists, News Groups, FTP & archive sites.

Readings

Reference: Carroll Jim & Rick Broadhead, The Canadian Internet Handbook
Week 1 Haraway, Donna "Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century"in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991) 149-181

Week 2 FTP sites
Week 3 Rheingold, Howard "Multi-User Dungeons and Alternate Identities" (145-175) and "Electronic Frontiers and Online Activists"(241-275) in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993)

Week 4 News Groups
Week 5 Turkle, Sherry "Making a Pass at a Robot" (77-101) and "Virtuality and Its Discontents" (177-209) in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995)

Week 6 Discussion Lists
Week 7 Dibbell, Julian http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/syllabi/readings/rape.html
"A Rape in Cyberspace or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society" Village Voice Electronic redistribution 1993
Week 8 Talkers
Week 9 Stone, Sandy [Rosanne Allucquere] "Split Subjects, Not Atoms; or, How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis " (393-406) from The Cyborg Handbook ed. by Chris Hubles Gray (Routledge, 1995)

Week 10 WWW Chat
Week 11 Derek Leebaert and William B. Welty "Knowledge and the New Magnitudes of Connection" in The Future of Software ed. by Derek Leebaert (MIT Press, 1995)

Week 12 Together on-line

Assignments

25% Review of a text (other than the assigned reading) by one of the five authors (500 words)
25% Daily Log of net activity (with weekly digest)
25% Paper comparing 2 of the 5 types of venues studied (2500 words)
25% Group assignment draft, critique and prep a questionnaire

Copyright © François Lachance 1997
All Rights Reserved
lachance@chass.utoronto.ca