CLC5408 New Media and the Transformation of "Public Spaces" (1st Term, 2009-10)

Time: Mondays, 6:45 - 9:30pm

Venue: Sino Building LT2

Instructor: FONG Ho Yin, Ian (email: ; phone: 31634088; office: Rm. 410 Hui Yeung Shing Bldg.)

This course articulates the inter-relationship between new media and public spaces with reference to literary, filmic, pictorial, and theoretical texts. In classical thought, the status of citizenship belongs only to a few privileged individuals. In the age of new media, how far is it possible that the status of ‘netizenship’ granted to every individual? What are the impacts of the ‘digital divide’ in shaping the formation of public spaces in our time?If each era has its own new media, this course first examines how the ‘first media age’ transforms our understanding of public spaces. Do new media of our era provide the growth of civil society or, negatively, lead to the rise of totalitarian society? Or the new media in each era does not do much to improvethe withering of public spacesas a result of the increasing colonization of these spaces by panoptican society? The debate between technology and society is discussed with focus on Marshall McLuhan’s technological determinism. We emphasize heterogeneity of public spaces. Borrowing from the concept of ‘rhizome’ from Deleuze, we examine the possibility of detotalized cyberspace. Or, the era of new media is seen in a pessimistic way as the era of dystopia with reference to the writings of Paul Virilio, Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard.When new media bring the phenomenon of ‘time-space compression’, we are also interested in investigating how schizophrenic spacesaffect our understanding of public spaces. The course will not forget to see how virtuality and simulation in shaping our senses of spaces. These are only some highlights of our course. You will definitely get much from this course if you position yourselves as the ‘prosumers’.

COURSE CONTENT & SCHEDULE(subject to change[1])

WEEK 1 & 2

  1. On Public Space
  1. Its Genealogies
  2. Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article”, Critical Theory and Society : A Reader, Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Mackay Kellner (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 1989), 136-142. (for reference, read also Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere)
  3. Richard Sennett, ‘The Public Domain’, The Fall of the Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977).
  1. ASpace withAffection
  2. Herman Hertzberger, ‘The Public Realm’ from Architecture and Urbanism (1991) collected in The City Cultures Reader, eds, Malcolm Miles, et al (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 253-255.
  3. JohnUrry, "City Life and the Senses",Companion to the City, GaryBridge and Sophie Watson (eds) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 388-97.
  4. Richard Sennett, ‘The Public Domain’, The Fall of the Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977), Chapter 1.
  5. 郭恩慈，〈序言(一): 將空間還給環境、將文化還給生活〉《香港空間製造》，郭恩慈編 (香港：Crabs Company Limited, 1998)

3. ASphere MediatingBetween Society and State

3.1. Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article”, Critical Theory and Society : A Reader, Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Mackay Kellner (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 1989), 136-142. (see also Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere)

3.2. 馬國明，〈公民社會與香港〉《路邊政治經濟學》

3.3.龍應台，〈文化政策與公民社會─香港有甚麼可能？〉2004年11月9日( (you can read her other articles in

3.4. Michael Edwards, ‘Civil Society as the Public Sphere’, Civil Society, (Cambridge: Polity, 2004),54-71. (read also pages 5-10 for a brief history of civil society)

3.5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘Imperial Sovereignty’, Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000), 183-204.

4. Politics of Public Space

4.1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 26-67.

4.2. Beazley, Harriot. "Street Boys in Yogyakarta: Social and Spatial Exclusion in the Public Spaces of the City",Companion to the City. GaryBridge and Sophie Watson (eds) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 472-488.

4.3. Janet Woolf Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 34-50.

– criticizing Walter Benjamin’s conception of the flâneur(for the flâneur, see Benjamin, ‘The Flâneur’, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism)

- for reference, see alsoThe Hours (read in parallel with Mrs Dalloway)

4.4.Michel Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972-77, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al (Sussex: Harvester, 1980), 146-165.

- 李永峰，〈中國公共空間從廣場轉向網絡六四前夕網民與當局網上纏鬥〉《亞洲週刊》, 26-4-2009. (read also Michel de Certeau, ‘General Introduction’, The Practice of Everyday Life)

4.5. 盧勁馳，〈自序〉《後遺 –給健視人仕‧看不見的城市照相簿》(香港：三聯，2009)

4.6. 《怪物》

4.7. Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Eyes of the Poor’, ParisSpleen, trans. Louise Varèse(New York: New Directions, 1970)

5. Heterogeneity of Public Space

5.1. Jane Jacobs, ‘Part Two: The Conditions for City Diversity’, The Death and Life of Great American Cities(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972): on city depends on hybridity (public spaces)

5.2.Michel Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’

5.3.Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Man of the Crowd’(read also Elias Canetti, ‘The Fear of being Touched’, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 15-6.)

5.4. Bulwer-Lytton, Eugene Aram (extracts from Chapter 5)

5.5.Hans Holbein, ‘The Ambassadors’

WEEK 3 & 4

  1. On ‘Old’ Media

On Orality

  1. Italio Calvino, The Invisible Cities(excerpts)
  2. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Section VII, Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth, Essex: Penguin and New Left Review, 1973), 238-9.
  3. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1996), 74-75 and 135-138: how electronic technology produces secondary orality

On Printing

Foucault, ‘… knowledge is ... the space in which the subject may take up a position and speak of the objects with which he deals in his discourse…’ (Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), 182)

  1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, Verso: 1991), Ch.1 -3.
  2. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, Charles Baudelarie (read Part II: ‘The Bohème’, 27-34 on feuilleton)
  3. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own(excerpts)

On Art, photograph and film

1.Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

2.Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia (1938) and Triumph of the Will (1934): film promotes Nazism (vs. printing promotes nationalism)

3.Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003)

On Television

1.John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, 2nd edn. (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2003), 25-35.

2.Theodor W. Adorno, ‘How to Look at Television’, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (Routledge, 1991), 136-153.

3.Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster. (read also Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War, and Election Battles(2005): how George W. Bush appropriates media spectacle to justify a war to protect public space (purveyor of truth); see also Television and the Crisis of Democracy (1990) and The Persian Gulf TV War (1992)by the same author)

4.Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 9/11(2004) (read in parallel with Wolfgang Becker, Good Bye Lenin! (2003))

5.杜琪峯《大事件》(2004) andAlejandro González Iñárritu,Babel(2006)

6.Michael Haneke, Hidden(2005): you do not know whether the reality on the screen is a copy of reality or reality itself.

7.Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la Vèritè’, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 413-419.

8.Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999), 325.

9.Samuel Weber, ‘Television: Set and Screen’, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Sydney: Power Publications, 1996), 108-128.

For the general discussion of the first media age, see Mark Poster, ‘Social Theory and the New Media’, The Second Media Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 3-22.

WEEK 5

  1. Technology and Society
  1. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 18-32 & 63-67.
  2. Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Medium is the Message’, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997), 7-21. (see also ‘Introduction to Part I’, 3-6)
  3. Raymond Williams, ‘The Technology and the Society’, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 2003), 1-25.
  4. Martin Lister, et al, New Media: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2003), 72-92: a brief introduction of McLuhan’s works.
  5. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, ‘Networks of Remediation’, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 2000),64-84.

WEEK 5 & 6

  1. On New Media
  1. Martin Lister, et al, New Media: A Critical Introduction (LondonNew York: Routledge, 2003), 13-37.
  2. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, ‘Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation’ and ‘Mediation and Remediation’, Remediation: Understanding New Media

- remediation: return to a state of sensory grace

  1. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001), 18-61. (see also the interesting prologue which consists of a number of stills from the film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov. Each still is accompanied by a quote from the text summarizing a particular principle of new media.) (see also his new ‘book’ on the web, Software Takes Command)
  2. Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding, Decoding’, The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 478-487. (new media change the process of production, circulation and consumption; prosumer (amateur/profession, consumer/producer))
  3. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, ‘The Prosumers’, Wikinomics: How Mass Collabortion Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio, 2006), 124-150. (this book is continued by clicking
  4. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’

WEEK 6 -7

V.The Web 2.0 Lesson

(leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.)

  1. Tim O'Reilly,‘What Is Web 2.0?: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’ (30 September, 2005) ( (see also also 莫乃光，《香港2.0》(香港：上書局，2008))
  2. Jay Cross, ‘Forever Beta’ (December 2007) (
  3. Chris Anderson,‘The Long Tail’, Wired (October 2004) (
  4. Aaron Barlow, ‘An Introduction to the Blogs’, Blogging America: The New Public Sphere (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2008), 1-34.(perpetual present, immediacy, easy language, blur the difference between speech and writing, present (immediacy) vs. absent, private and public, producer and user/consumer, process vs. result)
  5. Lev Manovich,Software Takes Command ( (See how the author describes his book: One of the advantages of online distribution which I can control is that I don’t have to permanently fix the book’s contents. Like contemporary software and web services, the book can change as often as I like, with new “features” and “big fixes” added periodically. I plan to take advantage of these possibilities. From time to time, I will be adding new material and making changes and corrections to the text.)
  6. Timothy Luke and Stephen K. White in ‘Critical Theory, the Information Revolution, and an Ecological Path to Modernity’, in john Forester, ed., Critical theory and Public Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 22-53.(many of the features of electronic writing, esp. of computer conferencing, might appear to conform to Habermas’s counter factualconcept of ‘the ideal speech situation.’)
  7. Pierre Levy, ‘The Art of Cyberspace’, Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, ed. Timothy Druckrey (New York: Aperture, 1996), 366-7.
  8. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’‘From Work to Text’
  9. Rob Shields, ‘Hypertext Links: The Ethic of the Index and Its Space-Time Effects’, The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, eds. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (New York: Routledge, 2000), 145-160: webpage is not a static text, but in motion; reference to Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, The Practice of Everyday Life: to grasp the experience of a city, it is necessary to move back to ground level.
  10. Borges, ‘The Book of Sand’
  11. Emmanuel Lévinas,Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1991), 25 and 35-40.
  12. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3-25.

- read also Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1999), 142-149,and Franz Kafka, ‘The Great Wall of China’, The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (London: Vintage, 1999), 235-249.

- change from ‘arborial’ beings, rooted in time and space, to ‘rhizomic’ nomads who daily wander at will across the globe without necessarily moving our bodies at all)(c.f. a online magazine called Rhizome)

  1. Pierre Lévy, ‘The Universal Without Totality: The Essence of Cyberculture’, ‘The Art of Cyberspace’, and ‘The New Relationship to Knowledge’, Cyberculture, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 91-102, 125-136, and 137-148.
  2. Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear’, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 81-88. (civilization –literary/written word: uniform; electric age – heterogeneous and barbaric, more fit to public space (?) which is heterogeneous in nature.
  3. Jose Ortega y Gasset, ‘The Coming of the Masses’, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1932), 12.
  4. Mark Poster, ‘Derrida and Electronic Writing’, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 99-128. (the logocentric subject is destabilized) (blog vs. postcard)
  5. Andrew Keen, ‘Blogs are Boring’(

- read also Andrew Keen,The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture; Matthew Arnold,‘Culture and Anarchy’, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader(Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2009), 6-11..

- you should also read Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 270-299.

WEEK 8: 26/10

No Class: Chung Yeung Festival

WEEK 9

  1. Social (Movement) Media or Digital Divide?
  1. John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (
  2. Mark Poster, ‘Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere’, Virtual Politics, ed. David Homles (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997).
  3. Pierre Lévy, ‘The Social Movement of Cyberculture’, Cyberculture, 103-114.
  4. Douglas Kellner, ‘Techno-politics, New Technologies, and the New Public Spheres’, in Illuminations, January 2001.(
  5. Manuel Castells, ‘The Culture of Real Virtuality: the Integration of Electronic Communication, the End of the Mass Audience, and the Rise of Interactive Networks’‘Conclusion: The Network Society’, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 1: The Rise of the Network Society, 355-406 & 469-78.
  6. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus’, The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During. (London: Routledge, 2007)
  7. Saskia Sassen, ‘Electric Space and Power’, Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 4, No.1, 1997: 1-18.
  8. Stephen Graham and Alessandro Aurigi, ‘Virtual Cities, Social Polarization, and the Crisis in Urban Public Space’ , Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 4, No.1, 1997: 19-52.
  9. Atton Chris, ‘Reshaping Social Movement Media’, Social Movement Studies, v.2, no.1, 2003. (for your reference only)
  10. Judy Wajcman, ‘Technology as Masculine Culture’, Feminism Confronts Technology (Oxford: Polity, 1991), 137-161.(for your reference)

WEEK 10

  1. Cyberspace –totalitarian or detotalized space?
  1. 潘小濤，〈一個比劉翔更紅的中國人〉《都市日報》(25/08/2009) (
  2. Lev Manovich, ‘On Totalitarian Interactivity (Notes from the Enemy of the People)’ (
  3. Baudrillard, ‘The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media’, Selected Writings
  4. Pierre Lévy, ‘Critique of Criticism’, Cyberculture, 211-217.
  5. Paul Virilio, Politics of the very Worst: An Interview by Philippe Petit, trans. Michael Cavaliere, ed. Sylvère Lotringer(New York : Semiotext(e), c1999), 12-3,20-21 &44-5.
  6. Paul Virilio, ‘Grey Ecology’, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London; New York: Verso, 1997), 58-9.
  7. Mark Poster, ‘Foucault and Databases: Participatory Surveillance’, Mode of Information
  8. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Derrida, Benjamin, the internet, and the New International’, Parallax, 2001, vol. 7, no.3, 6-11. (for the reference to Derrida, read Derrida, ‘Conjuring-Marxism’, The Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 2006), 61-95 (esp. 63-79)).
  9. Jodi Dean, ‘Webs of Conspiracy’, The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, 61-76.
  10. Larry and Andy Wachowski, The Matrix(1999)

WEEK 11-12

VIII. Schizophrenic Space

  1. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster
  2. Paul Virilio, ‘The Overexposed City’, The Blackwell City Reader, ed. GaryBridgeet al (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 440-448.
  3. Martin Scorsese, The Aviator(2004) (read alsoPaul Virilio, Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, transMark Polizotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 72-73.)
  4. Castells, ‘The Space of Flows’ in The Castells Reader on Cities Social Theory, ed. Ida Susser (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 314-366.
  5. For the concept of ‘time-space compression’, readR.J. Johnston, et al (eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 833-5. (for details, read David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Ch. 15-17)
  6. Michelangelo Antonio, Blowup (1966)vs. Ridley Scott, Blade Runner(1982)
  7. Scott Lash and John Urry, ‘Mobility, Modernity and Place’, Economies of signs and space(London: Sage, 1994), 269-278.
  8. Vincent Mosco, ‘Webs of Myth and Power: Connectivity and the New Computer Technopolis’, The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, 37-60: restatement of the importance of place, in spite of the ‘death of distance’ and ‘the end of geography’.
  9. Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, trans. Robert Bononno (New York: Plenum, 1998), 15-34.: virtualization: detachment of here and now
  10. Jurge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (London: Penguin, 1970)

WEEK 13

IX. Society of Spectacle and Simulation

  1. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
  2. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The System of Objects’, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, California: StanfordUniversity Press, 2001)
  3. Some Andy Warhol’s artworks
  4. Takashi Muradami (村上隆), ‘Superflat Monogram’ (
  5. Blade Runner
  6. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, Selected Writings

Assessment (details – to be announced)

- Group Presentation20%

- Reaction Paper (1500 words in Chinese or 2000 words in English each)30%