[Air-L] advice on course readings

[Jill Walker Rettberg]

I taught Julian Dibbell’s A Rape in Cyberspace (1993) a couple of weeks ago, and it worked REALLY well. It’s a classic essay about a case of harassment in a text-only online space (LambdaMOO) in the early 1990s, and raises so many issues that are still really central: online harassment, identity, digital dualism, democracy and governance of online spaces etc etc. We always taught this essay in the early days, but I hadn’t in about 10 years and I’m so glad I did: the students loved it and it led to excellent discussions. Also, you can actually still log into LambdaMOO! (I used the Terminal app on a Mac to connect.) So having students actually spend a bit of time in a MOO would certainly let them think about what social media / computer mediated communication was like in 1993. 

Julian Dibbell: A Rape in Cyberspace. 1993/1998.
http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/

How to log onto LambdaMOO
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/cs8113e_99_winter/lambda.html

For blogs: chapter 2 of my book Blogging is kind of a history of blogs. “From Bards to Blogs.” 
Rettberg, Jill Walker. 2014a. Blogging. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. 


There’s a short history of early online diaries and blogs in my chapter “Online Diaries and Blogs” for a forthcoming anthology on The Diary. 
http://jilltxt.net/txt/OnlineDiariesAndBlogs.pdf

Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities was influential in the early 1990s, and is now freely available online. Chapter one on the WELL in the 80s might be good for students. 
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/1.html

Other books on the topic that were taught during the 1990s include Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen (if you teach that, couple it with Nathan Jurgenson on digital dualism https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/04/23/sherry-turkles-chronic-digital-dualism-problem/), Steve Jones’ collection CyberSociety.

Oh, if you want something on MUDs and MOOs, check out Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik’s collection 
"High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs” (University of Michigan Press, 1998) It’s not all about teaching, there are a few chapters that cover the history of MOOs and MUDs and what they are.

There is much more of course. But this is some of it. 

Jill


Jill Walker Rettberg
Professor of Digital Culture
Dept of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies
University of Bergen
Postboks 7800
5020 Bergen

+ 47 55588431

Blog - http://jilltxt.net
Twitter - http://twitter.com/jilltxt
My book "Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves" is out on Palgrave as an open access publication - buy it in print or download it for free! 
http://jilltxt.net/books