Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Courses/The Anthropology of Cyberspace (Terry Epperson)/Course description

Course description
FSP 124-04 The Anthropology of Cyberspace

Course Description

Science fiction writer William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in 1982, long before the development of the Internet. Whether it is, as Gibson termed it in Neuromancer, “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators,” or merely where you go to find music and keep track of friends, cyberspace is a ubiquitous aspect of daily life. In this class we utilize a wide variety of media (e.g. social networking tools, scholarly research, science fiction, popular film) and employ the anthropological technique of participant-observation to gain analytical distance and address some fundamental questions. What do we mean by “cyberspace”? How did it come to be, and how could it have been different? How has it affected your ability to find and process information and create new knowledge? Are you more isolated or more sociable because of your cyber-interactions? We also explore these questions through our own interactions, researching and writing in small collaborative groups and conducting some of our discussions on online wikis. Similarly, we screen and discuss The Social Network in conjunction with conducting interviews and critical self-reflection about the role of social media such as Facebook in our daily lives. Rather than conveying a set body of knowledge, this class is a shared, multimedia exploration of the origins, experience, and future of cyberspace.

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