Oral history interview with Peter Wegner, emeritus professor of computer science at Brown University, and Fellow of the ACM.

The current issue of School of Arts & Science Frontiers magazine features a review of my recent work on the Internet and American commerce.

The article is written by B. Davin Stengel, and is called Doctors Without Modems? Technology Historian Nathan Ensmenger checks the pulse of the e-health revolution.

The Open Source Teaching Project represents an attempt to use Web 2.0 technologies and social networking to “create freely interactive media platforms which integrate academic and social content focused on critical thinking, college, and careers.”

Listen here to my interview with OST, where I discuss such diverse topics as “what is the history of technology,” “choices and technology,” “the problems with digital media,” and “doing research as an undergradute.”

It was a pleasure working with the OST. I regularly teach about open source projects, and have written a little about the lessons of open source for historians, but this is my first real open-source project.

This past year my cyberculture seminar happened to meet on Valentine’s day, and so we did a special session on online dating. One of the things to come out of that was an interview with a reporter from the Daily Pennsylvanian for its 34th Street Magazine. Here is her article entitled “Love in the Time of Facebook.” Good stuff.

At the recent Society for the History of Technology conference, held this year in Lisbon, I presented a paper called “Fixing things that can never be broken: Software maintenance as heterogeneous engineering.” At some point in the near future I hope to transform this short essay into a full-length paper. For the time being, here is the conference version.

This graduate seminar explores the emergence and widespread adoption in the early Cold War-period of a set of interrelated tools, techniques, and discourses organized around the concept of “information.” These emerging information science included not only new disciplines such as cybernetics, information theory, operations research, and ecology, but also some traditional physical sciences – such as biology and chemistry – as well as a broad range of social sciences, including economics, political science, sociology, and urban planning. The focus of the course will be on tracing the important structural changes in post-war science that encouraged the adoption of the rhetoric of information (if not its substance), as well as on extending the relevance of these developments to a wide range of topics in the history of science, medicine, and technology.

Download the HSSC 550 syllabus in PDF form

A PDF version of my paper from the recent Gender and Computer conference at the Charles Babbage Institute is now available online.

Here is a brief abstract of the paper:

The first computer programmers were women. In fact, the work of “coding” a computer, as it was originally envisioned, was an inherently feminized occupation: low-status, low-paid, and largely invisible. Today, of course, the situation has almost entirely reversed, and computer programmers have adopted an almost stereotypically masculine identity. The story of the transformation of the “computer girls” of the early electronic computer era into the “IT guys” of the present period is more than a mere historical curiosity: by highlighting the ways in which the professionalization of computing work also involved the masculinization of its practitioners, it sheds new light on contemporary questions about both the state of the computing professions and the issue of gender in computer science education.</blockquote>

UPDATE: my book-length history of computer programming, which is called The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise is now available.

ANOTHER UPDATE: a sequel to the "Making Programming Masculine" paper is in the works as part of a forthcoming special issue of Osiris dedicated to masculinity in science. Alas, although the paper is already finished, it will be another year at least before it sees print. (Academic publishing, please get with the program! This is the Internet Era...) The title of the new paper is ‘Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism’: Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions and the focus is on the emergence of the “hacker” identity in academic computer labs and its subsequent popularization in mainstream media. For slight more information, see my post on the The Cult of Masculinity in Computing.

On May 30, 2008 the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota will present a day-long public conference devoted to a much-needed examination of gender and computing. While the National Science Foundation and other policy actors have devoted immense resources to increasing women’s participation in computing, over the past two decades there has been a striking drop in women’s participation in computing education and a corresponding tail-off in the U.S. workforce. Clearly, an important “missing piece” is yet to be discovered. This international conference examines gender and the diverse uses of computing in offices, libraries, schools, mass media, and the computing profession.

I will be presenting a paper called “Making Programming Masculine.”

Registration for the conference is open until 20 May 2008. More information can be found here.

This Tuesday, March 4, I will be giving a talk called “Cyborgs, Artificial Intelligences, and Meat Machines: Computers and the Reinvention of the Body” at Drexel University as part of their Great Works Symposium. The talk is from 3:30-4:50 in Curtis Hall, Room 340

The video of this talk is now available.

UPDATE: The Internet and American Business is now out in paperback

Winner of the 2008 Choice Magazine award for outstanding academic title.

<img class=”left border src=”/nensmeng/images/internet-business-sm.jpg)”>

It’s finally here! The Internet and American Business has arrived via MIT Press. From the jacket blub: “Tracing the impact of the commercialized Internet since 1995 on American business and society, the book describes new business models, new companies and adjustments by established companies, the rise of e-commerce, and community building; it considers dot-com busts and difficulties encountered by traditional industries; and it discusses such newly created problems as copyright violations associated with music file-sharing and the proliferation of Internet pornography.”

My contribution is called Resistance is Futile? Reluctant and Selective Users of the Internet It explains why a series of industries – including healthcare and higher education – have not yet been radically transformed by the Internet.