CSCI E-10: Weekly Readings

Principal Texts

• Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold.
• Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle.
• Communities in Cyberspace edited by Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock.

Recommended Books

• Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age by Esther Dyson.

General Readings

Books and articles of general interest:

• "How the Internet Came to Be" by Vinton Cerf.
• "Short History of the Internet" by Bruce Sterling

• The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
• Educause Review
• "Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?" by Jan Fernback & Brad Thompson

Students may also find the following documents useful:

• The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking by Tracey LaQuey (Online Bookstore edition).
• "A Beginner's Guide to HTML" (from NCSA)

Some other books of interest (not available online) include:

• The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts (1994).
• CYBERVILLE: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town by Stacy Horn (1998).
• Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte (1995).
• Envisioning Cyberspace by Peter Anders (1998).
• Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stoll (1995).
• The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit by Sherry Turkle (1984).
• Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power and the Information Superhighway by Steven E. Miller (1995).
• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (Fiction, 1985).
• "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges, in Labyrinths (Fiction, 1962).
• Neuromancer by William Gibson (Fiction, 1984).

For further reference in print, computer science sections of major bookstores contain hundreds of titles on Internet-related subjects.

The WorldWide Web contains pointers not only to documents, not only to lists of documents, but also to lists of lists, lists of lists of lists, etc. Here are some pointers to such meta-lists that you may find useful.

• Howard Rheingold's Site
• Howard Rheingold's Old Site
• The EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation) List
• The List at Sunsite

February 4

• Pine e-mail manual
• Universal Access to E-Mail: Feasibility and Societal Implications by the Rand Corporation
• Electronic Communication at the White House (Educom Review, Jan/Feb 1994)

February 11

• Topica
• Yahoo Groups

Articles and documents about Usenet:

• What is USENET (1992)?
• The USENET FAQ (1994)?
• The Usenet Info Center Launch Pad

• Searching for the Leviathan in Usenet, by Richard MacKinnon, 1992.
• A Societal Model of Usenet, Master's Thesis by Bruce Overby.
• Dear Emily Postnews: Advice on Usenet Etiquette

Where to read Usenet messages:

• Google Archives -- Extensive archival service, includes current messages; text only.

Other Messaging Systems:

• Yahoo Clubs
• The New York Times Online Forums(first-time users must register before reading).

February 25

• "A Beginner's Guide to HTML" (from NCSA)

Articles and documents about IRC:

• IRC Resources on the Internet
• The IRC Etiquette FAQ
• Electropolis: Communication and Community On Internet Relay Chat (by Elizabeth M. Reid, 1991)

March 4

Articles, documents, and resources on MicroMUSE, DragonMUD, and and Educational MUSEs:

• Information about MicroMUSE
• Information about DragonMUD
• MUSE Manuals
• Additional Information on MUSEs and MuseNET
• Conferences on Educational Uses of MUDs

Articles, documents, and resources about MUDs in general:

• The MUD Resource Collection
• The Sunsite collection of papers on MUDs.
• Another collection of papers on MUDs
• The MOO Document Library -- most papers here available only for download and printing.
• Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities by Pavel Curtis

March 11

• Barry Kort's 6-part article to EdNET
• Creating A Community of Interest by Jen Clodius

March 18

• Life on the Screen -- Introduction and Chapters 3 and 4.
• Cyberville and the Spirit of Community by Roger Scime.

• PLATO: The Emergence of On-Line Community by David R. Woolley
• Gender Swapping on the Internet by Amy Bruckman
• Virtual Reality: Reflections of Life, Dream and Technology - An Ethnography of a Computer Society by Michael S. Rosenberg
• Dialog on Virtual Communities from FEED Magazine

• Bibliography: Towards an Anthropology of Internet Communities by Danny Yee
• The Case for a Global Hypernetwork Society

April 1

Articles on Graphical Virtual Reality Communities: The Activeworlds Resources Site

April 8

• Problems of Conflict Management in Virtual Communities by Anna DuVal Smith.

• Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities (by Elizabeth M. Reid, 1994) (Read Chapter 2 in particular).
• A Rape in Cyberspace, by Julian Dibbell, The Village Voice, December 1993, pp. 36-42.
• Life on the Screen, Chapters 1 and 2.

• Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990.

• From America Online (AOL):
  • Rules for Children's Area Chat Rooms
  • Parents' Guide to Children's Area Chat Rooms

April 15

Articles on Privacy and Security:

• The Persistence of Cookiesby Simson Garfinkel, HotWired, December 1996.
• DejaNews and Privacy: Response from George Nickas

April 22

Trademark and Copyright issues on the Internet and in Virtual Communities ():

• A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.
• UMG v. MP3.Com
• The Westlaw Online Law Publishing Case
• EBAY, Inc. v. Bidder's Edge, Inc.

• Sony Corporation v. Universal Studios
• American Geophysical Union v. Texaco Inc.
• Feist v. Rural Telephone Service
• Religious Technology Center v. Netcom: order denying Netcom's motion for summary judgement. There are also many other documents available concerning this case, better known as the Church of Scientology Case.
• Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy

• Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services (decision)and other related documents.
• Pro CD v. Zeidenberg

April 29

• World Wide Web Robots, Wanderers, and Spiders The Loebner Prize

May 6