The summer 2007 schedule for our "Reading Information Studies" book and beverages group is now in session. Tuition is free and the reading list is short: only three books. Homework includes reading the three books we've chosen, posting some ideas, questions, complaints, or musings to the web site here, and then attending a 3pm Friday discussion session on the Terrace. Any students, faculty, and staff broadly interested in "information studies" are invited to participate. Just send me a message if you'd like to be added as an "author" on the weblog.

The books this year were chosen with various purposes in mind. Several of us are interested in political-economic and cultural issues surrounding copyright, digital rights management, and new media. Tarleton Gillespie's new monograph Wired Shut has been garnering good buzz and as several of us know him (he's at Cornell in their STS department) we're eager to give his work a read. Some of us also know Fernando Elichirigoity, who just earned tenure down at the Univeristy of Illinois, and his work on the connections between information studies and global environmental crises provides a nice forum for us to discuss the sorts of issues that the UW SLIS Sustainability Working Group has recently organized to consider. (We're hoping that both Gillespie and Elichirigoity will contribute to our blog as we read their books.) Finally, diversity in media and technology studies is also a big issue around SLIS, especially with our successful recruiting of a couple of Spectrum scholars as new Ph.D. students arriving in Fall 2007. Thus we hope the volume edited by Nelson, Tu, and Hines on race and technology will be a thought-provoking reading.

Here's the full description of the three books, along with the discussion dates:

Friday June 22 3pm: Tarleton Gillespie, Wired Shut: Copyright and the shape of digital culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). [hardcover: $23]

While the public and the media have been distracted by the story of Napster, warnings about the evils of "piracy," and lawsuits by the recording and film industries, the enforcement of copyright law in the digital world has quietly shifted from regulating copying to regulating the design of technology. Lawmakers and commercial interests are pursuing what might be called a technical fix: instead of specifying what can and cannot be done legally with a copyrighted work, this new approach calls for the strategic use of encryption technologies to build standards of copyright directly into digital devices so that some uses are possible and others rendered impossible. In Wired Shut, Tarleton Gillespie examines this shift to “technical copy protection" and its profound political, economic, and cultural implications.

Friday July 20 3pm: Fernando Elichirigoity, Planet Management: Limits to Growth, Computer Simulation, and the Emergence of Global Spaces (Northwestern University Press, 1999). [paper: $28]

Planet Management is a study of, and contribution to, the history of "globality"--the emergence of a complex organization of politics, economics, and culture at a planetary rather than a national level. Drawing on historical archival research as well as recent theoretical work in science studies and critical theory, the book tell the story of the central role of technoscientific discourses and practices in the emergence of globality.

Friday Aug 17 3pm: Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines, eds., Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (New York: NYU Press, 2001). [paper; $21]

From Indian H-1B Workers and Detroit techno music to karaoke and the Chicano interneta, TechniColor's specific case studies document the ways in which people of color actually use technology. The results rupture such racial stereotypes as Asian whiz-kids and Black and Latino techno-phobes, while fundamentally challenging many widely-held theoretical and political assumptions.

All discussions will take place on the Memorial Union Terrace (or inside the Rathskellar if it's raining).

We do hope that, in addition your required reading of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this summer, you will join us as we read and discuss these three important books in the information studies field.

This week I've been on a bus tour of the state of Wisconsin with four dozen or so of the most interesting and engaged fellow faculty and staff I could ever hope to meet. We've visited public radio stations and private manufacturing plants, state correctional institutions (prisons) and state nature preserves (parks). We've talked to "regular" Wisconsin residents, alumni, and families only in the sense that there is no "regular" prototype into which they all fit. This is very reassuring. I've been reminded that we as UW faculty are well able to ask sincere but challenging questions to the people of our state -- and to each other. More importantly, we're usually well willing to try to answer such challenging questions. If there's been one disappointment for me on the trip, it's been the reminder from my own past positions of learning (both graduate training in social theory and corporate training in public relations) that the answers we allow ourselves to give to crucial questions around the state -- questions about justice and equity, development and sustainability, the meaning of the "good life" for Wisconsinites and the processes by which some are granted Wisconsinite status while some are not -- are often sadly limited by our own personal, cultural, and institutional positionalities. The warden of the Green Bay Correctional Facility says it is "not their problem" that their population is grossly misrepresentative in race and ethnicity of the Wisconsin citizenry as a whole -- just as I've sometimes heard that it's "not our problem" here in Madison that our incoming student body each year is similarly misrepresentative. It seems to me that the purpose of the Wisconsin Idea is to challenge us to think beyond our own positions, views, and responsibilities, if only for a moment, to consider our place in a larger circulation of lives, capital, energy, and ideas. It's a very ecological way of thinking, really, which should come as no surprise in the state of Aldo Leopold and Gaylord Nelson. But it's a way of thinking that can be difficult to learn and to sustain, especially when a lack of resources, attention, and political leadership make it easier for us to cocoon within our own institutions (or towns, or firms, or families) and ignore the outside world. If there's one thing I've learned from this trip, it is that we ignore that wider world -- it's problems, it's processes, and it's people -- at our peril.

(For more on this issue and the prison visit which inspired it, check out this UW News posting by Nicole Miller. And see my further musings on this trip at my main weblog, Uncovering Information Labor.)

Not only is this finals week, it's also "Bike to Work Week." (Personally, I think it should be called, "Bike, Walk, Run, Skate, Razor, Canoe, or Bus to Work Week," but what do I know.) I'm an advocate for both human-powered transportation and urban environments which encourage such transport. Although I am proud to say that I choose to either bike or bus to work every day, the most important sustainable transport choice I have made (and was privileged enough to make) was actually to select a residence within easy biking and busing distance of my work site in the first place. To all of my students who may be graduating this semester, I'd encourage you to think about making similar sustainable residential choices as you venture out into the world.


Photo: Greg's bug bike (note extended frame for carrying beer and children).

Happy May Day.

I had a professor once who would start off the semester by asking, "Where does your breakfast come from?" This led us into creative discussions of where other necessities of modern life came from, whether news and information, water and electricity, or clothing and shelter. Not coincidentally, this was the professor who introduced me to the idea of advocating, at minimum, a "living wage" for any and all laborers who help reproduce the many and various conditions of modern social life.

As someone who professes to study "information labor" I tend to think it is important to remember and recognize the ongoing and often hidden human effort, skill, thought, and value that underpins our daily material and cultural existence.

For more information on the changing value of human labor in our national information society, you might wish to explore the Economic Policy Institute. For a more local view, check out the Center on Wisconsin Strategy.