We will look at cyborg culture and the prospects for creating a new library of Alexandria.

Readings:

Cyborg Culture

• “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (The text is available on Google Books, pp. 28-37)
• “Johnny Mnemnonic” (There is an alternative online version here. You may want to copy the text into a Word processor to make it more readable.)
• “The Theory of the Virtual Class”
• Pranav Mistry, “Sixth Sense Technology”

• Videos for Born Digital
• “The Long Tail”
• “False Friendship”
• “Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube”
• Eric Faden, “A Fair(y) Use Tale”

• “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright”

A New Library of Alexandria

• “The Medieval Help Desk”

• Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Notes for a Technologies of Writing Seminar”
• Carlin Romano, “Will the Book Survive Generation Text”
• “Is Print Dead? (Is It Really?)”
• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (La biblioteca de Babel)
• “Inheritance and loss? A brief survey of Google Books”
• “Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars”
• “Scholars Elicit a Cultural Genome From 5.2 Million Google-Digitized Books”
• “Judge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books”