We’ll start off by examining some of the tools you’re probably most familiar with – and by asking ourselves what it means to call them “tools.” What constitutes a digital tool? How do tools delimit we can make and do with them?
Lab: Develop time management strategies for the semester.
Tools used: Found diagrams, spreadsheets, Trello, Workflowy.
To be read for today’s class:
- Moira Weigel, “Silicon Valley’s Sixty-Year Love Affair with the Word ‘Tool,’” New Yorker (April 11, 2018).
- To better understand the culture that gave rise to, and emerged from, Silicon Valley’s “tools”: “Don’t Be Evil: Fred Turner on Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers,” Logic 3 (2017) [read the first half; stop at “The Electronic Frontier”].
- Skim through some issues of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog [or, if the website isn’t working, which could itself teach us something about dysfunctional tools (!), see Sam Hart and Mindy Seu’s collection.]
- Mary Mattingly, “Access to Tools,” Triple Canopy 21 (July 2015).
- Sign up for your four Reading Response sessions.
