The digital revolution is everywhere. It invites itself into all debates, abolishes borders, shakes up norms and imposes a universal language. It is transforming whole sections of the traditional economy thanks to dematerialization and disintermediation. But the digital is moving away from the Californian dream, relaxed, idealistic and libertarian. Exponential digitalization brings its share of concerns: domination of economic interests, dystopian surveillance, destruction of values and jobs, dilution and dispossession of identity.
But the digital world escapes any established standards of governance, public and corporate ones. In order to recover some control over this revolution shaking up democracies, public space and public policies, we need to better understand how it works.
To do so, this course will proceed along three axes: decoding, coding and exploring. Decoding will be a cross-disciplinary approach to the digital, spanning history, sociology, politics, and science. Coding will involve working with, and creating, digital objects (websites, videos, podcasts, visualizations...). Exploring will take the form of a digital exploration: an investigation on the social, economic and/or political impact of digital technologies on human behaviors and practices.
I recommend you all to watch Dominique Cardon's short videos, which are - to my knowledge - not available elsewhere. They will help us understand how digital technology is revolutionizing politics, the economy and society as a whole (and practice french for none natives !).
On my side, I will try to demystify these technologies. They are often based on simple principles and intuitions, that are essential to understand what is at stake and what room for maneuver is available for the future.
- 0. 🔌 01101000 01101001 00100001 (slides)
- 1. 🌐 Why does the internet work ? (slides)
- 2. 🏛 Will GAFAM take over states ? (slides)
- 3. 🧑💻 Coding workshop
- 4. 🔐 Cybersecurity (slides)
- 5. 🤖 What's the IQ of AI ?
- 6. Conclusion & Presentations
- Grading & Assessment
- Resources
- Introduction
- Roots of the digital revolution
- Explorations set up
- Additional resources:
- Code.org - How computers work ?
- Code.org - Computer Science Principles
- Harvard CS50 - Understanding technology
- Computerphile - Alan Turing and Enigma
- John Perry Barlow. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace / 1996
- Lawrence Lessig - Code is Law. On Liberty in Cyberspace / 2001
- Werner Herzog - Lo and Behold
- Walter Isaacson - The innovators / 2015
- Deep dive in a network of networks:
- The infrastructure
- The internet
- The web
- A distributed governance
- Many geopolitical implications
- Additional resources:
- Code.org - How the internet works ?
- Yochai Benkler. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom / 2006
- Goldsmith, Jack L. & Tim. Wu. Who controls the Internet? illusions of a borderless world / 2006
- DeNardis, Laura. The Global War for Internet Governance / 2015
- Janet Abbate. Inventing the Internet / 1999
- Julia Evans. Networking Ack!
- Kieron O’Hara, Wendy Hall. Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance
- Castells Manuel. The Internet galaxy : reflections on the Internet, business, and society / 2001
- The economy of web platforms
- Network effects
- Information gatekeepers
- A regulatory challenge
- Interoperability vs. Competition
- Additional resources:
- Introduction to programming
- Workshop on a language or tool chosen with you.
- Additional resources:
- Cryptography
- Threats
- Surveillance
- Hackers
- Due individual note
- Additional resources:
- Alex Gibney - Zero Days
- Alex Gibney - We steal secrets
- Dominique Cardon - Fake news panic
- Marc Meillassoux, Mihaela Gladovic - Nothing to hide
- Laura Poitras - Citizen Four
- Brian Knappenberger - We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
- Simon Klose - TPB AFK
- Steven Levy - Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution / 1984
- Big data
- Artificial intelligence
- What's next ?
- Additional resources:
- Q&A
- Explorations wrap up
You are requested to be proactively involved during classes and to participate in collective discussions. You also need to be active online and contribute to discussions, share knowledge, thoughts and reflections with your classmates via the tools retained for this purpose.
From reading a scientific article, a book or a long-read article, you will comment a story, a concept or a theory that will be useful to conduct your digital exploration.
- This is a fairly free exercise, but should be no more than two pages long, written in English or in French.
- This is an individual exercise but you will be able to share it with other members of your group with a goal to extract ideas that will structure your final exploration.
- Choose an article and extract a concept that is relevant to your exploration. Your personal note may explain the main point of the chosen document, go over its surrounding debates, and show its relevance regarding your exploration topic.
In groups of 4 to 6, you will undertake a study about a practice, a service, a company, a law... of your choice in the digital space. The aim of this project is for you to explore some aspects of the digital revolution and to practice digital tools.
- Your exploration will rely on bibliographical or webographical references (academic papers, web pages, press articles or reports...) but also on your own empirical data (interviews, questionnaires, ethnography, online data collection or experiments..).
- The submission of this exploration will have to be done as a digital-first format (website, video series, podcast, but also possibly Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc.) and/or rely on digital investigations (data collection and analysis).
- You exploration will showcase the overall problematic tackled, the analysis and methodology, interpretations and synthesis of the results.
- Keep in mind that a good digital exploration is based on a well-define research topic, a critical analysis and a digital format providing a creative experience.
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Online learning:
- The best course to learn computer science from scratch, CS50, is available on YT and through a MOOC
- A more practical introduction to coding can be found at codecademy.com
- For data wrangling, that could be useful in your studies, udacity.com has some very good hands on courses. I recommend (from simple to complex):
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Books: