The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Communication Studies Resources

Communication Studies/Digital Media Resources
Compiled and edited by Karla Tonella

Theorists and Personalities Digital Media

  Digital Media:  • Cyborgs  •  Communities  •  Gender  •  Hypertext  •  People  •  Nets & Industry
 • News & Zines  •  Production  •  Systems  •  Technology  •  VR  •  Other Sites
  to Communication Studies & other media     •  to Journalism & Mass Communication
Vannevar Bush Steven Johnson Brenda Laurel Ted Nelson
Mark Dery Michael Joyce Lev Manovich Helen Nissenbaum
Heinz von Foerster Kevin Kelly Humberto Maturana A. R. "Sandy" Stone
Donna Haraway George Landow Stuart Moulthrop Sherry Turkle
N. Katherine Hayles     Francisco J. Varela
Ernst von Glaserfeld   Janet Murray Robert M. Young

Vannevar Bush

As We May Think
Vannevar Bush wrote this article for the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.  A slightly different version appeared later in Life  magazine. Bush is credited with the invention of hypertext. Also available from the Atlantic Monthly server.
Events in the Life of Vannevar Bush
A timeline produced for a symposium on Bush by David Klaphaak, Brown University Computer Graphics Group. 
"As We May Think" -- A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision
An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished and What Remains to Be Done. A Symposium at MIT, 1995. Abstracts of papers and biographies of presenters and some remains of the event -- most interesting is "A Photographic Appreciation" of Vannevar Bush and his inventions
Vannevar Bush and the Memexx
A section from Chapter One in George P. Landow's book Hypertext and Critical Theory.
Vannevar Bush: Hypertext Prophet
Time 100 - March 29, 1999 Vol. 153. No. 12. Special issue: Time 100/ Scientists & Thinkers of the 20th Century. [Free article has been removed. This link goes to abstract where you can purchase the article.]
 Remembering the Memex
A FEED magazine article which annotates Bush's original essay, with hypertext contributions from a "panel of leading writers and critics, including hypertext pioneer Michael Joyce, Release 1.0's Esther Dyson, and Wen Stephenson, editor of The Atlantic Monthly's Web site, Atlantic Unbound.

Mark Dery

Mark Dery's Pyrotechnic Insanitarium
Articles on Barbie, slash fan fiction, McLuhan, and more, interviews with and by Dery, and extended promotions for Dery's books with excerpts. Full text of his pamphlet Culture jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. 
Bibliography
UC Irvine Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow A Selective Bibliography: The UCI Libraries January 11, 13, 18, & 20, 2000 Prepared by Ellen Broidy, History Bibliographer, The UCI Libraries  
An Eruption of Freakery
"Forget the mainstream. As cultural pathologists like Mark Dery argue, the clues to deciphering millennial America may lie at its extremes." By Scott Stossel (article from The Atlantic Online, April 22, 1999)
 

Heinz von Foerster

Heinz von Foerster, the Scientist, the Man
by Franciso Varela in a special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review  devoted to the exploration of convergences and dissonances between Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities. "Heinz von Foerster is the real architect of what can be called second-order cybernetics, which deals with the pervasive role of self-reference in all these domains, including the inevitable second-order observation of the observer."
Interview with Heinz von Foerster
Conducted by Stefano Franchi, Güven Güzeldere, and Eric Minch in the Stanford Humanities Review . See above. 
Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics
Heinz von Foerster's opening address for the International Conference, Systems and Fam ily Therapy: Ethics, Epistemology, New Methods, held in Paris, France, October 4th, 1990.  
Radical Constructivism Heinz von Foerster page
An annotated bibliography with links to many papers by and about von Foerster maintained by Alex Riegler
Obituary, NY Times
"Heinz von Foerster, a physicist and a philosopher who was an early leader in the field of information theory, died on Oct. 2 at his home in Pescadero, Calif. He was 90."

Donna Haraway

Art and Science in Chaos: Contesting Readings of Scientific Visualisation
"This paper will compare two recent approaches to the problem of finding a place for scientific visualisation as a cultural artifact. Vivian Sobchack's reading of Chaos Culture in her 1990 Artforum article gives a cultural critique of chaos imagery as a postmodernist metaphor in the worst sense, of a refusal of bodily scale and the historical situation. In Donna Haraway's recent work she tries to construct a way of contesting scientific knowledge or stories for the creation of public meanings without sacrificing scientific values. " --Richard Wright Digital Imaging Group London Guildhall University
I'd Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg (UI access only)
Lucy Tatman, European Journal of Women's Studies: Feb. 2003, 10:1 - available to U. Iowa people electronically. May be available to other university libraries via EBSCOhost. "…This article explores the possibility that Haraway's cyborg is a saviour-figure, made partially in the image of a transcendent God. It suggests that cyborgs do have an origin story, and that their story is inseparably linked to the theological development of Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history, which is itself linked, arguably, to the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution…"
Science, Ideology and Donna Haraway
By Robert M. Young. "This began life as a talk given at Nottingham Polytechnic, in which I attempted to re-think the concept of ideology in the light of social constructivism, especially the astonishing achievement of Donna Haraway in Primate Visions.  Much revised, it appeared in Science as Culture  (no. 15) 3:165-207,1992 " (Microsoft Word version)

Excerpts from Haraway's books

A Cyborg Manifesto : Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
from Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (NY: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-181
The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies PDF Document
from Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (NY: Routledge, 1991), pp. 203-230
Cyborgs, Trickster, and Hermes: Donna Haraway's Metatheory of Science and Religion
by William Grassie published in the June 1996 issue of Zygon. "This article is a close reading of two essays by Donna Haraway on feminist philosophy, the biophysical sciences, and critical social theory"
The Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit:
Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s or A Socialist Feminist Manifesto for Cyborgs. By Donna Haraway "This is an early version of Donna Haraway's influential essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." The complete version appears in Haraway's book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature  (New York: Routledge, 1991): 149-181."  PDF version
The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others
In: Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York; Routledge, 1992) , pp. 295-337. PDF version
Hyperlink to Donna Haraway
Tsuyoshi Toyofukua created this page of links to information and articles about and by Donna Haraway from Japan.
Wired magazine archive of Haraway articles
You are Cyborg (1997) - Cyberbeats (1998) - The Desire to Be Wired (1993)
How Like a Leaf
An interview with Thyza Nichols Goodeve
Bibliography
From the Feminist Theory Website by Kristin Switala
Witnessing the Postmodern Jeremaid: (Mis)Understanding Donna Haraway's Method of Inquiry
By Ingrid Bartsch, Carolyn DiPalma and Laura Sells in Configurations 9.1 (2001) 127-164. [requires UI ID to access]
A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies [requires UI ID to access]
Configurations 2.1, Winter 1994 [requires UI ID to access]
A Tragedy for Cyborgs
John R. R. Christie, Configurations 2.1, Winter 1993 [requires UI ID to access]
voXygen: A Breath of Fresh Text: Donna Haraway
Professor Laura Sells (Louisian State U) calls this her "Ode to Donna Haraway." Includes an annotatedbibliography, links to other online Haraway sources and related articles.
 

N. Katherine Hayles

Boundary Disputes: [requires UI ID to access]
Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics "Virtual reality did not spring, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, full-blown from the mind of William Gibson. It has encoded within it a complex history of technological innovations, conceptual developments, and metaphorical linkages that are crucially important in determining how it will develop and what it is taken to signify."
Chaos as Orderly Disorder: Shifting Ground in Contemporary Literature and Science
Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theatre of Representation
In New Orleans Review, 18 (1991) and was reprinted in Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture edited by George Levine. "… it now seems the aspect of science most in need of explanation is its power to arrive at apparently ahistorical and transcultural generalizations"
Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature
In Culture Machine 5 (2003). "In the last few years, electronic literature has moved beyond the print-based assumptions characteristic of first-generation texts into second-generation works that increasingly exploit the capabilities offered by digital environments."
Engineering Cyborg Ideology
A review of Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric  by Diane Greco
Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis [requires UI ID to access]
PostModern Culture 10.2 (2000). "Using only the characteristics of the digital computer, what is it possible to say about electronic hypertext as a literary medium? "
Materiality of Informatics [requires UI ID to access]
From Configurations  1.1 (1993) 147-170, which may not be viewable to non-subscribing institutions. Hayles considers "how the body is constructed within postmodern discourse as an immaterial informational structure. . ."
Materiality Has Always Been in Play
An interview with N. Katherine Hayles by Lisa Gitleman from The Iowa Review Web. Also available as a PDF version.
Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers
Appeared in October 66, Fall 1993, © October Magazine,  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Technocriticism and Hypernarrative [requires UI ID to access]
A special issue of Modern Fiction Studies (43.3, Fall 1997) edited by Hayles. Authors include: Michael Joyce, Jaishree Odin, Sue-Ellen Case, Stuart Molthrop, Marie-Laure Ryan, Thomas C. Foster, Joseph Tabbi, Robert Markley and N. Katherine Hayles.
How We Became Posthuman:
Humanistic Implications of Recent Research into Cognitive Science and Artificial Life. RealAudio presentation with outline slides.
Previews of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.
"Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety"  and
 "From Hyphen to Splice: Cybernetic Syntax in Limbo"
Prosthetic Rhetoric and the Posthuman Body (talk drawn from How We Became Posthuman delivered July, 1997, Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition)
The Posthuman Body: Inscription and Incorporation in Galatea 2.2 and Snow Crash [requires UI ID to access]
from Configurations 5.2, Spring 1997
N. Katherine Hayles' Homepage
Chaos and Critical Theory - Moses A Boudourides
Contributed Paper at the International conference "Einstein meets Magritte" Brussels, 1995

Ernst von Glaserfeld

Glaserfeld homepage
at the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute  University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Includes a comprehensive bibliography, a biographic sketch, and a dozen articles.
Partially Annotated Bibliography
By Alex Riegler
Ernst von glaserfeld: Publications
Current as of March 2001 - from the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute, U. Mass at Amherst
In Memory of a Pioneer (Silvio Ceccato, 1914-1997)
Article by Glaserfeld on the "founder and director of the first Cener for Cybernetics in Milan, Italy."
An Introduction to Radical Constructivism
Originally published in P. Watzlawick (Ed.), Die Erfundene Wirklichkeit. Munich: Piper, 1981. Author's translation in P. Watzlawick (Ed.), The Invented Reality. New York: Norton, 1984.
Ecology of Mind: Ernst von Glaserfeld
"Put Your Questions to Ernst von Glaserfeld" with very recent answers by Glaserfeld is the putstanding feature here.
Constructing Communication
Interview with Ernst von Glaserfeld by Andrea Pitasi, 2001
Why I Consider Myself a Cybernetician
from Cybernetics & Human Knowing: A Journal of Second Order Cybernetics & Cyber-Semiotics, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1992
Distinguising the Observer: An Attempt at Interpreting Maturana
Knowing without Metaphysics: Aspects of the Radical Constructivist Position
from, a development of Task 7 of the EU-TSER Research Project: The Self-Organization of the European Information Society (SOEIS).
Radical Constructivism and Teaching
"The author maintains that there can be no understanding without reflection. Reflection is induced by verbalization and can therefore be encouraged by fostering conversation. Ceccato's notion of 'operational awareness' will be shown to be relevant to teaching and compatible with Piaget's theoretical model."

Steven Johnson

Interface Culture
Steven Johnson's book as described at Amazon.com
Interface Culture Chapter 2 "Desktop"
Annotations are hung off the text were written by students and not especially useful
God, Man, and the Interface by Harvey Blume
(Atlantic Unbound, October 1997) In addition to the article on Johnson and his book, this site features several excerpts from the book, an email exchange between Blume and Johnson and reaction from readers.
Infinity Imagined
In this Feed magazine article, Steven Johnson reprints the last section of the last chapter of his book Interactive Culture and follows it with "a special Loop discussion area" where the conversation continues. You will also find several links to other articles in the inserts.
Interface This
Scott Rosenberg critiques Johnson's book in Salon 21st ezine.

Michael Joyce

Michael Joyce's Homepage
Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics
Introduction for his book The Comfort of Knowing We Are Not Lost

Kevin Kelly

Out of Control   
The entire book is here. Kevin Kelly is the Executive Editor of Wired  magazine. Kelly's book describes how techology is becoming biological, decentralized and distributed.
New Rules for the New Economy
This latest book is also offered online in its entirety.
Kevin Kelly's Homepage
New Rules for the New Economy
10 radical Strategies for a Connected World

Brenda Laurel

Brenda Laurel Homepage 
Computers as Theatre: Brenda Laurel: Master of Interface
A multi-part interview in ZDTV: Television About Computing, June 12, 1997
Creating Core Content in a Post-Convergence World
"from the AIGA "Collison!" conference in April Y2K examines the problem of where media content comes from, and who will pay for it - and how communities and economies can be built around content."
Interview with Brenda Laurel
Jason Challas, in Switch e-magazine  
Issues In Multimedia Interface Design: Media Integration And Interface Agents
by Brenda Laurel, Tim Oren, and Abbe Don. Keywords: multimedia interface, media integration, cross-media links, interface agents, guides, point of view, narrative
New Players, New Games
"Cultural change accelerates as the children of the Atari generation get their pudgy little hands on media we never thought of. Technology literacy evolves into a subconscious expectation that things work and are fun. After decades of thinking we knew what that meant, game designers suddenly find themselves facing an explosion of diversity in terms of both the technological landscape and the potential audience for interactive entertainment." Speech delivered at The Interactive Frictions conference in Los Angeles in 1999
Tools for Knowing, Judging, and Taking Action in the 21st Century
An April 2000 speech "about how the evolution of our technologies and tools will be profoundly shaped by our values."

George P. Landow

World Wide Web Versions of Materials Created in Intermedia, Storyspace, and Print
The Freud Web; The Religion in England Web; The Victorian Web; Cyberspace, Hypertext, and Critical Theory; and Postcolonial and Postmperial Fiction Web
Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory & Technology
The table of contents and the full text of Chapter One, "Hypertextual Derrida, Poststructuralist Nelson?"
George Landow's Homepage, Brown University

Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich Homepage, UC San Diego
See especially Essays, Multimedia and Text  
Assembling Reality: Myths of Computer Graphics
"I will approach the problem of "realism" in 3D computer animation starting from the arguments advanced in film theory in regard to cinematic realism. First, I review the key accounts which situate the realism of film in the histories of cinematic technology and style. The next section tests themodels suggested in these accounts on the history of computer animation and computer graphics research. The third section shifts emphasis, considering realism in computer animation as an effect of subject matter."
The Death of Computer Art
"Perhaps only the artists from post-communist societies are ready to recognize that in an information society the noise is as meaningful as the signal, and that the nature of technology is that it does not work as it supposed to."
Global Algorithm 1.3: The Aesthetics of Virtual Worlds
"In contrast to modern literature, theater, and cinema, which are built around the psychological tensions between characters, these computer games return us to the ancient forms of narrative where the plot is driven by the spatial movement of the main hero, traveling through distant lands to save the princess, to find the treasure, to defeat the Dragon, and so on."
The Paradoxes of Digital Photography
Published in: Photography After Photography. Exhibition catalog. German, 1995. "I will present the logic of the digital image as paradoxical; radically breaking with older modes of visual representation while at the same time reinforcing these modes. I will demonstrate this paradoxical logic by examining two questions: alleged physical differences between digital and film-based representation of photographs and the notion of realism in computer generated synthetic photography."
What is Digital Cinema?
"The challenge which digital media poses to cinema extends far beyond the issue of narrative. Digital media redefines the very identity of cinema."

Humberto Maturana

Ecology of Mind: Humberto Maturana
Short bio, links to articles, links to other resources
Tutorial on the autopoetic theory
of Maturana and Varela by Randall Whitaker
An Introduction to “Maturana’s” Biology
By Lloyd Fell, and David Russell, who, along with Alan Stewart, edited Seized by Agreement, Swamped by Understanding, a book of papers about Maturana's ideas.
The Contributions of Humberto Maturana to the Sciences of Complexity and Psychology
Alfredo B.Ruiz: Instituto de Terapia Cognitiva, Santiago, Chile. Full text of article originally published in the Journal of Constructivist Psychology
Biology of Cognition
As reprinted in Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living Dordecht: D. Reidel Publlishing Co., 1980 pp. 5-58
Chilean School of Biology of Cognition The Unofficial Web Page of Humberto Maturana
The Unofficial Web Page of Humberto Maturana

Stuart Moulthrop

You Say You Want a Revolution: Hypertext and the Laws of Media
From Postmodern Culture   v.1 n. 3 May, 1991
Where To?
A review of Forward Anywhere by Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall - Eastgate Systems
Stuart Moulthrop's Home Page
Collections of his hypertexts and essays can be found here.
The Shadow of an Informand: An Experiment in Hypertext Rhetoric
The Color of Television
by Stuart Moulthrop and Sean Cohen [hint: click on "media ecology" graphic for best navigation.]

Janet Murray

Hamlet on the Holodeck
This essay was excerpted from Murray's book Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, 1997
Chapter 3: From Additive to Expressive Form (excerpt)
Janet Murray's homepage

Theodore (Ted) Holm Nelson

Ted Nelson 1990 World Tour
The keynote lecture at the first stop of Ted Nelson's 1990 World Tour, the 'Multimedia 90' conference, held in Linkping, Sweden on September 10th., 1990.
Ted Nelson @ W.R.I.T.E.'94
Short quotes from Ted Nelson's speech to the 1994 W.R.I.T.E. conference.
Project Xanadu
Many articles about Ted Nelson and his project, Xanadu
Orality and Hypertext: An Interview with Ted Nelson
Jim Whitehead conducted this interview with Ted Nelson

Helen Nissenbaum

Helen Nissenbaum homepage
Securing Trust Online: Wisdom or Oxymoron (PDF document)
Published in Boston University Law Review, 7/24/2001. "This essay … is an attempt to show that the way we stipulate the conditions of the online world may be decisive for whether or not trust is achieved."
How Computer Systems Embody Values (PDF document)
Published in IEEE Computer, March 2001. "Its mystery lies in seeing values as part of technology … we must grapple with the new demands that changes wrought by the presence and use of information technolgy have placed on values and moral principles.
Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters (PDF document)
Published in The Information Society, 16(3):1-17, 2000. "The broader debate about the dual possibilities of media: to be democratizing or to be colonized by specialized interests at the expense of the publich good, inspires and motivates this article on the politics of search engines."
Protecting Privacy in an Information Age: The Problem of Privacy in Public (PDF document)
Published in Law and Philosophy, 17: 559-596, 1998. "I argue that information and communications technology, by facilitating surveillance, by vastly enhancing the collection, storage, and analysis of information, by enabling profiling, data mining and aggregation, has significantly altered the meaning of public information"
Bias in Computer Systems (PDF document)
Written with Batya Friedman and published in ACM Transactions on Information Systems  July 1996, 330-347. "Preexisting bias has it roots in social institutions, practices, and attitudes. Technical bias arises from technical constraints or considerations. Emergent bias arises in a context of use."

Allucquère Rosanne "Sandy" Stone

Sandy Stone's Homepage
Interview for Mondo 2000
This is the version that MONDO 2000 *  didn't* publish.
Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?
This essay was first published in the anthology Cyberspace: First Steps,  ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): 81-118. "Since so much of a culture's knowledge is passed on by means of stories, I will begin by retelling a few boundary stories about virtual cultures. "
Violation and Virtuality:
Two cases of physical and psychological boundary transgression and their implications

Sherry Turkle

An Ethnologist in Cyberspace
Sociologist Sherry Turkle explores the emotional and intellectual connections to virtual pets, chat rooms and other products of the computer age --Marguerite Holloway,Scientific American, April 1998.
At the Heart of a Cyberstudy, the Human Essence
Interview with Sherry Turkle Katie Hafner,The New York Times, June 18, 1998. "The computer is a marginal or boundary object, a mind that is not quite a mind; it does not really "think," yet it is in some sense a psychological machine"
Constructions and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality
In the MUDs, the projections of self are engaged in a resolutely postmodern context. There are parallel narratives in the different rooms of the MUD; one can move forward or backward in time. The cultures of Tolkien, Gibson, and Madonna coexist and interact. Authorship is not only displaced from a solitary voice, it is exploded.
Cyborg Babies and Cy-Dough-Plasm
Ideas about Self and Life in the Culture of Simulation. "The answers to the classical Piagetian question of how children think about life are being renegotiated as they are posed in the context of computational objects that explicitly present themselves as exemplars of "artificial life."
The Human Side of the Screen
Profile of Sherry Turkle Alex Pham,The Boston Globe, February 24, 1999."One of her recurrent messages: the Internet will not replace stores, boutiques, shopping malls, and supermarkets. Instead, browsing on-line will only whet people's appetite for the real thing."
Session with the Cybershrink: an Interview with Sherry Turkle
By Herb Brody from Technology Review, 1996. "[C]yberspace takes the fluidity of identity that is called for in everyday life and raises it to a higher power: people come to see themselves as the sum of their distributed presence on all the windows they open on the screen. "
I 'R Us: Rethinking Identity With Sherry Turkle
An interview by Robert Atkins. "The Net dramatizes, concretizes, makes it more urgent to confront what's true anyway. I'm alway interested in the question of what might have been. If the Internet had come along 50 years ago, we surely wouldn't have this mass movement of gender-switching. It's a matter of resonance, of moving things to a higher order."
Who Am We?
An interview in Wired. "We are moving from modernist calculation toward postmodernist simulation, where the self is a multiple, distributed system."
Sherry Turkle's Homepage, MIT 
Seeing Through Computers: Education in a Culture of Simulation
The American Prospect, no. 31, March-April 1997. "The uncertainty about what students (and the rest of us) need to know reflects a more general cultural change in the understanding of computer"
Mr. Rheinhold's Neighborhood. Howard interviews Sherry
"Computers and communication networks are not drugs. They are complex media that different people (and different social and political groups for that matter) use in different ways. " See Also Interview 2 and Interview 3
Virtuality and its Discontents: Searching for Community in Cyberspace
Adapted from Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle, 1995
Visit to the Cybershrink
Profile of Sherry Turkle Dan Tebbutt, Australian Consolidated Press Magazine [Online], March 1999.
What Are We Thinking About When We Are Thinking About Computers?
In The Science Studies Reader,Mario Biagioli (ed.). New York: Routledge, 1999. "Here I present examples of how engaging with a variety of computational objects (interfaces, virtual communities, and simulation games) provides material for reshowing categories of knowing, of identity, and of what is alive."

Francisco J. Varela

Heinz von Foerster, the Scientist, the Man
by Franciso Varela in a special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review  devoted to the exploration of convergences and dissonances between Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities. "Heinz von Foerster is the real architect of what can be called second-order cybernetics, which deals with the pervasive role of self-reference in all these domains, including the inevitable second-order observation of the observer."
Francisco Varela Homepage
Although Varela died May , 28, 2001 this page is still active. It contains an extensive bibliography
The Third Culture - Chapter 12
Varela on "The Emergent Self" excerpted from The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brockman (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
The Three Gestures of Becoming Aware
An interview with Varela conducted by Claus Otto Sharmer, January 12, 2000.
First-person Methodologies: What, Why, How?
Introduction to The View From Within by Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear
Autopoiesis and a Biology of Intentionality PDF file

Robert M. Young

Robert M. Young's Homepage, United Kingdom
The Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies of the University of Sheffield
Psychoanalysis and/of the Internet
"I wrote this to inform members of the 1995 Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere conference about psychoanalysis on the 'net and included some reflections on net dynamics. It was extended and developed for a seminar at the Sheffield Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies in January, 19."
Primitive Processes on the Internet
This is an exploration of people's primitive feelings about computers and getting on the Internet. It also examines some of the fantasy and other irrational elements of being on the 'net. It draws inspiration from Sherry Turkle's new book Life on the Screen: Identity in the age of the Internet.
Robert M. Young's Online Archive

Other Theorists of Interest

Gregory Bateson
A page devoted to the anthropologist and cyberneticist with a short biography and links to articles by and about Bateson.
 
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
by Walter Benjamin
Douglas Kellner
"Transforming technopolitics and technoculture. spectical and seduction into critical media pedogogy"

Places to visit that served as a source for some of these papers

A Self-Guided Tutorial in Biogenetic Structuralism
A body of theory that some colleagues of mine and I have developed over the past 20-plus years. It is a perspective that integrates anthropology, human evolution, phenomenology and neuroscience. -- Charlie Laughlin
CTheory
Edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.
Cultronix
"An interdisciplinary journal of art and cultural studies, addressing critical issues in contemporary institutions and practices. It publishes contributions spanning a wide range of media, and encourages contributors to use new media in order to expand critical and theoretical work to Internet reading audiences."
Culture Machine 5 (2003) The e-Issue
This special issue edited by Gary Hall features N. Katherine Hayles, Mark Amerika, Ted Striphas, Andy Miah, Alan Clinton, Charlie Gere, Anna Munster, Cathryn Vasseleu, Chris Chesher, Gregory Ulmer, and Bernard Stiegler. See Also, Issue 3 (2001) Virologies: Culture and Contamination.
Feed Magazine
Some of the most thoughtful people writing on digital culture and hypermedia publish here.
Stanford Humanities Review: Constructions of the Mind: Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities
The Volume 4, issue 2 is devoted to the exploration of convergences and dissonances between Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities.
Technology Review
MIT's magazine of innovation.
Self-Organization, Stystems theory & Constructivism,
An online course, a development of Task 7 of the EU-TSER Research Project: The Self-Organization of the European Information Society (SOEIS).
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