Internet Culture and Community course looking for a home http://www.alansondheim.org/internet.jpg Looking for part-time online teaching work, re. below - if you have any ideas, please back-channel and let me know. The following is a very rough outline drawn from the initial course proposal; it wasn't the formal application. "Just found out today that my online course on 'Internet Culture and Community' at U. Nebraska, Omaha, has been canceled, due to budget cuts. If anyone at a school thinks a course like this would be of interest there, please let me know. It was online, one semester, open to anyone, especially liberal arts students. Thanks, Alan" (from Facebook) The original proposal was presented to the University of Nebraska, Omaha; it was accepted. It took two years literally to get it approved. Now I have the materials, and would like to teach the class somewhere else. It's completely online. I'm not asking for anything beyond some funding, and hopefully community. Here's part of the original proposal: I want to propose a course dealing with the origins, theory, and practice of Internet art and culture; I know this is broad. Depending on the level of the students, I could use the writings of Peter Salus, for example, on early Net culture (I also have some original xeroxed documents here, going all the way back to 1968-71). I'd want to cover newsgroups, Fidonet, text-based applications like MOOs, MUDs, IRC, even ytalk, etc., and then move into early graphic applications like ThePalace and other virtual worlds at the time. Then everything 'explodes,' in a sense - covering NASA, Google and Google maps/worlds, Facebook, mobile apps, etc., and thinking about all of these in terms of media and corporate ecologies. Topics would include issues of fake news, online and offline racism, "darknet" organizing, bullying, media control, and so forth. All of this would be coupled with consideration of the distinction between the analog and digital, which I feel in fundamental; it's something I've written about a great deal. We would even begin with the abacus, to talk about the distinction, as well as such things as potential wells and noise on the line. We'd move through issues of bot veracity, addiction, the commons, and neoliberal control. We'd look at Twitter and other current social apps. Topics would change as online changes, almost minute by minute. Everything necessary for the course is online. Again, depending on the structure (lecture course or seminar), I would ask for individual research papers or presentations. At this point, we would also look at issues of hacking and dissemination of conspiracies. And we would also look fundamentally at online art, ranging from Jodi to Stelarc to Second Front and a host of artists working with community and alternative approaches to being online. I want to thank everyone who contributed suggestions for the course. Again, suggestions more than welcomed. ___ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
