The Final Project!

1. abundance
2. acceleration
3. accountability
4. agency
5. amateur
6. analog
7. artificial intelligence
8. auteur
9. author
10. authoritarianism
11. authority
12. basic income guarantee
13. biopiracy
14. blog
15. blogipelago
16. blogosphere
17. broadcast
18. "California Ideology"
19. canon
20. citizen
21. citizen journalism
22. code
23. collaboration
24. commons
25. commonsense
26. commonwealth
27. consensus
28. consensus science
29. consent
30. control
31. copyright
32. creative commons
33. credentialization
34. critique
35. crypto-anarchy
36. culture
37. culture industry
38. cybernetics
39. cybernetic totalism
40. cyberspace
41. cyborg
42. democracy
43. democratization
44. digirati
45. digital
46. digital divide
47. dissensus
48. diversity
49. elite
50. enclosure
51. end-to-end principle (e2e)
52. enframing
53. enhancement
54. eugenics
55. excludability
56. externality
57. fair use
58. filtering
59. finitude
60. free software
61. The Future
62. futurity
63. futurology
64. genomic enclosure
65. gift economy
66. information
67. industrial model
68. liberal subjectivity
69. linking
70. mapping
71. mass culture
72. mass mediation
73. media
74. micro-payments
75. monster
76. Moore's Law
77. negative liberty
78. Neoliberalism
79. Net Neutrality
80. Netroots
81. network
82. node
83. objectivity
84. open source
85. participation
86. panopticon
87. peer
88. peer to peer (p2p)
89. planetarity
90. popular
91. post-humanist
92. precarity
93. precarization
94. privacy
95. private property
96. professional
97. propaganda
98. prostheses
99. prosumerism
100. public
101. publication
102. public good
103. public relations
104. reductionism
105. relational
106. representative
107. retro-futurism
108. revolution
109. rivalrousness
110. robotics
111. secrecy
112. security
113. sharing
114. Singularity
115. social
116. social aesthetics
117. social networks
118. socialization
119. sousveillance
120. spectacle
121. spontaneous order
122. stakeholder
123. surveillance
124. technocracy
125. technology
126. technoscience
127. techno-utopianism
128. "Tragedy of the Commons"
129. transparency
130. viral


For your Final Project you will generate a kind of personal conceptual mapping of the subject matter of the whole course. In order to produce this map, you will need to draw on readings and notes over the course of the whole term. Many connections and problems will likely become clear to you for the first time in making this map. Before you make your choices you should spend some time dwelling over the whole list above, since what may at first seem obvious choices often give way to different questions and concerns once you give them more thought.

The assignment is quite straightforward:

[one] Choose forty-four Keywords from the list above.

[two] Organize your chosen Keywords into three separate, conceptually connected, sets. You can use any criteria that seems useful to you to organize these sets. The only rule is that no resulting set can contain fewer than eight Keywords.

[three] Each of the three sets should be given a unique title or heading and an introductory paragraph (no longer than a single page) that elaborates the criteria governing your choices as to what would be included in that set.

[four] Once you have organized your three sets in this way, briefly define each one of the Keywords you have included in each set in your own words. Ideally, your definitions should be as clear and as concise as possible. These definitions should be a matter of a sentence (or at most two), NOT a paragraph or more. They really are just definitions, not essays or lengthy explanations. It should be clear from your definitions why each of the Keywords in each of the three sets are conceptually connected to each other, but it is also crucial that no terms within any set are treated by you as synonymous, and that your definitions distinguish Keywords from one another clearly (even if the resulting distinctions are sometimes matters of nuance).

[five] Once you have defined all these Keywords, provide a short quotation (feel free to edit and prune to keep your chosen citations properly pithy) from one of the texts we have read this term to accompany each one of your definitions. The quotation you choose can be a definition you found helpful in crafting your own definition, it can be an example or illustration you found especially clarifying, it can a matter of contextualization, framing, or history that you found illuminating, it can even be something you disagreed with so strongly it helped you understand better what you really think yourself.

Obviously, there are endless ways of organizing these sets, defining their Keywords, distinguishing them from one another, and connecting them up to the texts we have read. What matters here is that you follow the rules of the exercise, not that you arrive at some single "right answer" you may fancy I have in mind.

Everyone's map will likely be quite dramatically different from everyone else's. That's a feature, not a bug.

Many students might also find it useful to introduce additional elements to their final projects -- illustration, cartography, collage, AV supplements, sculpture, games, and so on. None of these are required but students are welcome to make this final project their own, to introduce additional formal and experimental dimensions that help you come to terms with the course material as a whole in your own way once the basic requirements are satisfied.

I hope this final project is both illuminating and also enjoyable for you all, as I know it can be. You'll discover, as in so much else, the love you take is equal to the love you make.