ENGL 3036: Digital Anxieties: January - April 2013
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Important terms

These are lists of important terms from each of our texts. You will be tested on your understanding of what the terms mean (in the context of the texts) and how the concepts suggested by the terms are being used within the authors’ arguments. In general, the page numbers below refer to the main places where the authors discuss or define the terms; there may certainly be other places in the books where the terms are important.

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
Google and artificial intelligence
Taylorism
Universal medium

The Dumbest Generation
The betrayal of the mentors
Bibliophobia
Culture war (page 218)
The dumbest generation (page 26 and elsewhere)
The Flynn Effect (page 91)
Knowledge deficit
The Matthew Effect (page 59)
Techno-cheerleaders (page 125)

You Are Not a Gadget
Computationalism (page 153)
Cybernetic totalism / digital Maoism (page 16)
Design lock-in (page 7)
Digital humanism (pages 23, 178, and elsewhere)
Drive-by anonymity (page 63)
New digital economy (pages 100-01)
Metaness (page 28)
Moore’s Law (page 8)
Neoteny (page 179)
Noosphere / hive mind (pages 48-50)
Postsymbolic communication (page 190)
Second-order expression (pages 121-22 and elsewhere)
The Singularity (pages 24-25)

Alone Together
adolescent moratorium (especially pages 152-53)
alive enough (especially pages 28-29)
ELIZA (pages 23-24) and the ELIZA effect (pages 24-25, 131)
fearful symmetries (pages 168-70)
narcissistic personalities, including alterity and selfobjects (pages 55-56)
the robotic moment
the romantic reaction to robots
Rorschach (especially pages 24, 76-81)
sociable robots

Reality is Broken
alternate reality games (page 125)
collaboration (page 268)
crowdsourcing (page 220)
emergensight (page 278)
engagement economy (page 227)
fiero (page 33)
flow (page 35)
four defining traits of a game (page 21)
happiness hacking (page 188)
prosocial emotions (page 82)
rewards: intrinsic and extrinsic (esp. pages 46 and 49)
satisfying work (pages 55-56)
social participation tasks (page 253)
unnecessary obstacles (page 22)

World Wide Mind
corpus callosum (pages 8-9)
engram (page 132)
Hebbian learning (page 40)
multiplex (page 142)
the Omega Point (page 162)
optogenetics (pages 126-27 and elsewhere)
small-world networks (page 134)
superorganism (page 185) and hyperorganism (page 187)
telempathy (pages 143-44 and elsewhere)



Marc R. Plamondon, Ph.D. Department of English Studies Nipissing University