R. Stuart Geiger

Category Archives: Reviews and Responses

• Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr

  Saturday, November 8, 2008

  This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job.

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• Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

  Saturday, November 1, 2008

  A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories?

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• Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner

  Saturday, August 9, 2008

  An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive.

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• Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker

  Monday, May 12, 2008

  Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda.

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• Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson

  Thursday, April 12, 2007

  This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson.  It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel.

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• Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson

  Friday, March 23, 2007

  William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities.

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• Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell

  Monday, January 29, 2007

  In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, [...]

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