Introduction: There are two parts to this exam. The first asks you to identify several passages, each drawn from the texts we've read and discussed this semester. The second asks you to write an essay interpreting and integrating ideas and perspectives from several of those texts. The purpose of the exam is to have you : 1) reflect on the entire semester's work; 2)demonstrate your understanding of the texts; and 3) offer your own perspective on some of the many questions and issues we've discussed this semester.

Part I: Identification and Explication (1 hour)

For any four (4) of the quotations given below, identify the author who wrote it, and the text in which it appears. Then briefly explain how it represents or is indicative of particular points or arguments made by the author. Your answers needn't be longer than a paragraph or two, but they should make clear the significance of the passage by relating it to one or more of the major themes in the text and/or the Unit of the course in which the text was assigned (a complete list of assigned texts can be found at the end of this exam).

1. "The Great Depression certainly did not help matters. In Looking Forward, Franklin Roosevelt wrote, 'I believe that after the experience of the last three years, the average citizen would rather receive a smaller return upon his savings in return for greater security for the principal, than to experience for a moment the thrill of the prospect of being a millionaire only to find the next moment that his fortune, actual or expected, has withered in his hand because the economic machine has again broken down." The assumption of New Deal programs -- like Social Security -- was that Americans preferred the 'security' of sustenance to the 'thrill' of finding success. For many years, this was true."

2. "The event was notable for many reasons, but one especially is of interest here. Several times during both matches, Kasparov reported signs of mind in the machine. In the second tournament, he worried there might be humans behind the scenes, feeding Deep Blue strategic insights."

3. "For whatever we do today in physics -- whether we release energy processes that ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic evolution, or penetrate with the help of telescopes the cosmic space to a limit of two and even six billion light years, or build machines for the production and control of energies unknown in the household of earthly nature, or attain speeds in atomic accelerators which approach the speed of light, or produce elements not to be found in nature, or disperse radioactive particles, created by us through the use cosmic radiation, on the earth -- we always handle nature from a point in the universe outside the earth."

4. "Because of recent activities on the Internet, some believe that there is an urgent need to balance the privacy interests of individuals against the economic interests of online businesses as well as against the interests of the greater public good -- that is, to balance the interests of those groups (such as government agencies and corporations) who claim to have a legitimate need for information about individuals collected on the Internet against the needs or rights of those individuals about whom the information is collected. Others, however, believe that simply using a balancing scheme based on the tradeoff of interests involving the individual good versus the larger social good misses an important point because such a decision procedure fails to take into account the significance of privacy as a social (as well as an individual) value."

5. "Only if one thinks of the subject as an autonomous self independent of the environment is one likely to experience the panic performed by Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics and Bernard Wolfe's Limbo. this view of the self authorizes the fear that if the boundaries are breached at all, there will be nothing to stop the self's complete dissolution. By contrast, when the human is seen as part of a distributed system, the full expression of human capability can be seen precisely to depend on the splice rather than being imperiled by it."

6. "How then, is any practical relationship established between what is in people's heads and what is out there beyond their ken in the environment? How in the language of democratic theory, do great numbers of people feeling each so privately about so abstract a picture, develop any common will? How does a simple and constant idea emerge from this complex of variables? How are those things known as the Will of the People, or the National Purpose, or Public Opinion crystallized out of such fleeting and casual imagery?"

7. "A heterogenous society benefits from shared experiences, many of them produced by the media. These shared experiences provide a kind of social glue, facilitating efforts to solve shared problems, encouraging people to view one another as fellow citizens, and sometimes helping to ensure responsiveness to genuine problems and needs, even helping to identify them as such."

Part II: Essay (2 hours)

Each of the following topics asks you to consider the works of several authors, and to synthesize their perspectives and your own into a persuasive essay. Choose one (1) of the topics, and write an essay that communicates your thoughts as clearly as possible, while drawing on specific examples from the texts we've read this semester to support your views, arguments and explanations. Please know that none of the topics have been formulated to elicit a "right" or "correct" view or response, and your essay will be evaluated based on the quality, coherence and inspiration of your insights and arguments.

• Computing and the Future of the Self: The term "self" may bring to mind the ego, individuality, personhood, subjectivity, boundaries and responsibility. This in turn may inspire some thoughts about psychology, biology, politics, and technology. These thoughts can easily lead to questions about whether and to what extent our "self" is something solid or fluid, something rooted in nature or constructed in society. In a provocative book published this semester called Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William J. Mitchell writes:

  "Consider, if you will, Me++.

  "I consist of a biological core surrounded by extended, constructed systems of boundaries and networks. These boundary and network structures are topological and functional duals of each other. The boundaries define a space of containers and places (the traditional domain of architecture), while the networks establish a space of links and flows. Walls, fences, and skins divide; paths, pipes, and wires connect." (Me++ (MIT Press, 2004), p. 7)

  Several of the assigned texts this semester make arguments about the ways in which computing should alter our intuitions, senses and certainties concerning the nature, boundary, and value of the Self. Choose two (2) authors you believe speak to these issues and, in a brief essay that interprets each of their views and presents your own, discuss the future of the concept of the Self in a digital age.

• Computing and the Future of Education: Although none of the units of CS9 were devoted to education, and none of the assigned texts were written about schooling, any discussion of the relationship between technology and knowledge, politics, or ethics might be thought to have educational consequences. Indeed, technology has regularly played an important role in helping to shape the answers to the question "What is education (for)?" by different societies at different points in their history.

  Today one hears a great deal about the future of education in light of the internet. Earlier this week Google announced that it will digitize, and make available online, the full libraries of University of Michigan and Stanford as well as archives from Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library; and this seems a good example of an event with educational consequences that some think dramatic while others think nil. In their "Introduction" to a recent issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education devoted to computer technology and its educational consequences, the editors wrote:

  "Nothing is predictable as one explores education on the Net. Huge and exciting potentials open up, alongside aspects that occasion alarm or even horror. Minor innovations take on major significance (word processing perhaps, or the listserv) whilst elaborate technological developments begin to look educationally marginal or trivial (is multimedia as important as e-mail or file transfer? how useful is videoconferencing really?). Some intellectual possibilities seem to close down whilst others open up, ... and the more one thinks about the Internet, the less one seems technologically at its mercy, yet the more locked in conflict with the forces in society who seek to control or promote it." (Nigel Blake and Paul Standish, Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 34, No. 1, 2000, p. 5)

  Several of the assigned texts this semester make arguments that, if taken seriously, could (and perhaps should) influence the nature and purpose of schooling in the 21st century. Choose two (2) authors who you believe make such arguments and, in a brief essay that interprets each of their views and presents your own, discuss the future of schooling in a digital age. You may focus on a particular level of schooling (e.g. undergraduate education) or on schooling generally.

• Computing and the Future of the Public, the Private, and the Social: Although The Human Condition may have been your first exposure to someone reading so much into the Public/Private distinction, it's a remarkable fact that the drawing of lines between public and private for the purposes of social, political and legal analysis has been a basic characteristic of Western thought since antiquity. Yet, just as Arendt called attention to the effects of what she called the "social" realm on the significance of the public and the private, so today we wonder whether the effects of new computer-based communications technologies are altering the boundaries between the public and the private.

  Several of the assigned texts this semester might be thought to suggest future possibilities and/or perils for distinctions between: the nature of the public and private realms; the politics of public life and private life; and the ethics of "publicity" and "privacy". Choose two (2) authors (in addition to Arendt) who you believe speak to some of these issues and, in a brief essay that interprets each of their views and presents your own, discuss some aspect of the future of the public/private distinction.

CS9 Required Texts (Fall 2004):

• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958).
• Cherny, Andrei. The Next Deal: The Fate of Public Life in the Information Age (Basic Books, 2000).
• Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Post-Human (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
• Langford, Duncan (editor). Internet Ethics (St. Martins Press, 2000)
• Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion (Free Press, 1997 [1922]).
• Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press, 1988).
• Sunstein, Cass. republic.com (Princeton University Press, 2001).

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