Reading List

A detailed review of Postman’s argument that television turned public discourse into entertainment — and why the thesis applies even more forcefully to the internet age.

The foundational text of media theory. McLuhan’s argument that “the medium is the message” — that the form of a technology shapes society more than its content — is the lens through which everything else in this course makes sense.

A detailed narrative history of the internet from Netscape to the iPhone. The essential primer on how we got here.

The prophetic argument that screen media turns public discourse into entertainment. Postman’s warning was that Huxley, not Orwell, got it right.

The historical pattern: every information technology — telephone, radio, film, television — starts open and ends monopolized.

A short manifesto, naive in retrospect, but it captures the genuine utopian moment. Worth reading to understand what was lost, not just what went wrong.

The ARPANET origin story, told from primary sources. The engineering and human history of how the internet was built.

Rigorous intellectual history tracing how 1960s counterculture ideals became Silicon Valley’s founding mythology. Explains why people believed the internet would liberate us — and why that belief wasn’t naive at the time.

The inventor of the World Wide Web tells the story of its creation. His original vision was radically open and democratic — worth understanding on its own terms.

The serious academic case that networked information economies enable genuinely new forms of collaborative production — Wikipedia, open source, citizen journalism. Strong theoretical framework with real evidence.

How the internet collapsed the cost of group formation and collective action. Written before the disillusionment set in, but the core theory is still sound.

An empirical study of how open source communities actually function. A genuinely new framework for understanding digital commons — who maintains them, why, and what breaks.

The contrarian argument that the internet is a technology of centralization, not decentralization — and that this is a feature of the technology itself.

The original articulation of how personalization hides the world from you.

How algorithmic recommendations are flattening culture — music, food, travel, everything trending toward sameness.

Controversial content spreads not because it’s important but because disagreement itself is what makes it viral.

How recommendation algorithms radicalize ordinary people. The best reporting on the internal mechanics of algorithmic amplification.

Pro-social life got expensive; anti-social life got cheap. One of the best framings of what’s happening to young men.

IQ scores are declining for the first time in a century, with the steepest drops among 18–22 year olds. Newport connects this to the displacement of deep reading by screen-based skimming.

How the internet both alleviates and deepens loneliness depending on how it’s used — deepening existing relationships helps, but substituting screen time for in-person contact makes isolation worse.

How the internet is rewiring our capacity for deep thought and sustained attention.

The most comprehensive evidence roundup on the link between social media and teen mental health.

Cowen pushes back on Haidt’s thesis, arguing the mental health crisis is concentrated in the Anglosphere rather than universal to smartphone adoption. A useful counterpoint.

Why averages miss the point. The relationship between social media use and mental health is nonlinear — light use may be harmless or even beneficial, but beyond a threshold, harm escalates sharply among vulnerable subgroups.

The most data-driven case that phone-based childhood and social media are driving the teen mental health crisis.

Meta-analysis finding a J-shaped relationship between social media use and depression in adolescents — evidence that harm concentrates among heavy users rather than being evenly distributed.

Fukuyama’s argument that the internet — not polarization, populism, or any single ideology — is the root cause of political dysfunction.

How algorithmic sorting undermines deliberative democracy by eliminating the "unchosen encounters" that a functioning republic depends on.

The case that flexible, industry-driven standards should precede rigid government regulation — because we don’t yet understand enough about how to govern technology effectively to codify rules that won’t do more harm than good.

A legal and regulatory framework for governing technology platforms, grounded in rigorous legal scholarship.

Short, punchy, from someone who helped build the original internet. A personal call to action to close the course.