Warning: Stylesheets are not enabled in your mobile device. In order to properly view Socialtext Mobile, you will need to enable stylesheets in your browser options.
Log in
UC Berkeley Social Media | What's New | Tags | Search
Smart_Mobs.jpg

Virtual Communities/Social Media

Sociology 167 (Information 190)

University of California, Berkeley
Department of Sociology
Spring 2008
Friday, 2-5, 126 Barrows
Instructor: Howard Rheingold howard@rheingold.com
Office 472 Barrows, Office Hours Friday 1-2 and earlier Friday by appointment
readers: Elisa Oreglia elisa@ischool.berkeley.edu and Stephanie Gerson sgerson@nature.berkeley.edu (but please send all emails to Elisa)

Course reader: available at Copy Central 2560 Bancroft (and Telegraph) 510 848 8649

Final Exam

Course Description

Expectations, Assignments, and Grading

Private Student Wiki

Quiztaker

Class Schedule


Session One: January 25, 2008

Theme: When technology and community collide


Introductions: Who are we, where do we think we're going in this class?

Instructor and students introduce themselves, instructor explains goals, expectations and assignments. After instructor presents the syllabus, students break out into groups to discuss learning goals and report back to instructor who will take notes on the wiki, modeling what student note-takers will do in future class meetings. The blog and wiki software are introduced and students make introductory posts in both media.

Lab: Introduction to Online Media


Assignments:



Words to know

Discussion notes -- what is community? Is that definition universal?

Instructor's Notes for Session One

Session Two: February 1

Theme: Imagining community


Getting into it: What did we find in our search for virtual community? What did the texts reveal, provoke, confuse, clarify? How did blogging go?

In theory, we discuss what we found in our search for two communities to join, talk in small groups and in plenary with the instructor about Tonnies, Wellman, Berman, and Oldenberg's views on community. The instructor tries to point out the key elements of these different takes on community. In practice, the instructor moves beyond the mechanics of blogging and wikiwork and introduces the rhetoric of these media. Time is spent talking about what a personal learning journal is and how and why to keep one.

Required Readings:


Lab: Deeper into social media


Assignments:


*An exemplary post

Key Questions To Keep In Mind:


Words to know


Instructor's Notes for Session Two
----

Session Three: February 8

Theme: Imagining community and discussing it virtually


Building on theory, solidifying practice

In theory and practice, we move on to individual and group investigations of communities of the virtual kind. How do we think about virtual communities? How does it feel to join one? What do the learning journals of A+ students look like? We take time out to practice.

Required Readings:



Lab: Personal Learning Journal


Session Four: February 15

Theme: Roots and visions of social cyberspace


The olden days

Interview with a codger: instructor waxes philosophical about the olden days of social cyberspace; students puzzle over whether they can get where they are going online by learning about where online sociality came from.

Required Readings:


.html .html <h4 style="color:#FF0000;">Recommended Web Resources: </h4> .html * Matei, S. (2005). "From counterculture to cyberculture: Virtual community discourse and the dilemma of modernity." _Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication_, 10(3), article 14. "available online"<http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/matei.html> <h4 style="color:#FF0000;">Assignments .html * Continue to make class notes and reading entries into your "personal learning journals"<http://www.socialtext.net/socialmediaberkeley/index.cgi?wiki_ii> weekly * Continue "blogging"<http://www.socialtext.net/stanfordsocialmedia/index.cgi?blogging_ii> and commenting * Continue to sign up on the wiki for syllabus readings for which you will facilitate discussion, together with two other students .html <h4 style="color:#FF0000;">Key Questions to Have in Mind: </h4> .html * How did the invention and early use of computer-mediated communication media differ from the way mainframe computer technology and culture developed? * In what ways did the predictions of Taylor, Licklider, and Rheingold about the future of online culture hit or miss the mark of today's social cyberspaces? * Did a counterculture subvert the megamachine, or the other way around? .html <p> .html

Session Five: February 22

Theme: Early social cyberspace in practice


More excursions into yesteryear, moving forward into collaborative media

We continue to examine the origins and early development of social media as a lens for viewing the coevolution of the institutional, social, and technological aspects of today's cyberfied world, we use Open Space social processes together with collaborative wikiwork to experience as well as discuss the effects of social media.

Required Readings:



Lab: Wikis for Learning and Collaboration


Assignments


Session Six: February 29

Theme: Networks and Social Networks


here is the TouchGraph social network visualization: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGFacebookBrowser.html

Forget the "information society" -- we are in the early stages of the "network society

Many to many media are sociotechnical phenomena that combine human social practices with the affordances of networked digital media. As we will see next session, social networks are something that humans have been doing since we were humans. But the structure and dynamics of technical networks such as the Internet have amplified, augmented, extended, and transformed the social networking capabilities homo sapiens have exercised ever since our brains made language possible.

Required Readings:


Key Questions to Keep in Mind


Lab: Many-to-many asynchronous discussions: Forums


Assignments


Session Seven: March 7

Theme: Networks, social networks, and online social networks:


Why Facebook matters

Virtual communities are a variety of online social networks. Are we in the midst of a transition from community-centered online media (and offline life) to "networked individualism?" We look at the intertwingling of identity, performance, online network, and face-to-face socializing taking place via networked digital publics on MySpace and Facebook.

Required Readings:


Recommended Web Resources:



Exercise: How do SNSs inscribe social practices? How do architectures influence sociality?


Session Eight: March 14

Theme: Collective action


Talking is important, but using communication to organize collective action drives the evolution of civilizations

The power of social cyberspaces becomes more than cognitive and social when it is used to organize collective action in the physical world -- markets, hunting parties, organized agriculture, education, warfare, governance, to cite a few examples. We review the fundamentals of collective action: social dilemmas that grow from the tension between the individual and the group, institutions for collective action that enable groups to overcome, manage, or bypass the dilemmas that block action, and the broad dynamics of human cooperation.

Required Readings:


Recommended Readings:


Lab: Cooperation Games



Special Guest: Marc Smith

Session Nine: March 21

Theme: The Public Sphere in the Internet Era


"The Public" -- a special variety of community, essential for democracy

Democracy is not just about voting for your leaders -- it also requires the formation of "public opinion," whereby citizens discuss the issues that concern self-governing populations, and thereby influence policy. Media and discussion are central to the public sphere. We look at possibly the most important question about virtual community -- can online discussion improve the health of democracy?*

Required Readings:


Lab: Introduction to semi-synchronous media


Assignments


Key Questions To Keep In Mind:



SPRING BREAK


Session Ten: April 4

Theme: Identity -- onscreen and off


How we behave reflects who we are

Identity and social performance are co-constituted. We look at the ways we look at ourselves, the way others see us, and how life online affects who we think we are. We seek clues to why people can take symbolic performances in social cyberspaces seriously enough to get married or commit suicide offline. In the lab, we start our creation of "avatars" -- online identities -- and begin our exploration of the immersive virtual world Second Life.

Required Readings:


Recommended Readings:


Key Questions To Keep In Mind:



Special Guests: Justin Hall and Merci Hammon will talk about being the first blogger and their startup -- Passively Multiplayer Online Games

Session Eleven: April 11

Theme: Designing and Maintaining Online Communities


How can online communities be designed, grown, managed?

Attention is a scarce commodity online. We examine the characteristics of successful virtual communities and look at the reasons they fail and look at the design principles, norms, new roles such as online hosts that planners of online discussions would do well to understand. In the lab, we meet in Second Life and the physical world simultaneously.

Required Readings:


Recommended Readings:


Lab


Assignments


Key Questions To Keep In Mind:



Special Guest: Wagner James Au

Session Twelve: April 18

Theme: Social capital


How social networks help get things done

We look at the way people manage to create institutions for collective action, from social societies to democracies, without relying on hierarchies. We ask wther and how the relationship between person-to-person communications, networks of reciprocity, and norms of trust that Putnam discusses can and cannot be facilitated online.

Required Readings:


Recommended Readings:



Lab


Assignments


Key Questions To Keep In Mind:


 * What is the relationship between community and democracy?
 * What can only be done alone, and what requires collective action?
 * Do networks of trust and reciprocity work better or worse in the always-on era?

Session Thirteen: April 25

Theme: Smart Mobs


Untethered Internet + Social Networks = Mobile Ad-Hoc Communities of Interest, Practice, and Action

Ubiquitous mobile phones and untethered Internet access enable the formation of ad-hoc social networks among people who would never have been able to organize collective action before, at paces and in places where coordinated action -- political, economic, social -- was not possible before. The instructor named these new mobile social gatherings "smart mobs." Instructor tells about how he stumbled on, explored, and described this phenomena.

Required Readings:


Lab: Second Life and First Life


Assignments


Key Questions To Keep In Mind:



Session Fourteen: May 2

Theme: Sharing Economies


Do online social networks enable new forms of production?

We examine the contention that Wikipedia, open source production, emergent citizen response to disaster, and other online social activities might be, as Yochai Benkler claims, the first manifestations of a new mode of production, alongside the firm and the market: "non-market peer production.

Required Readings:


Recommended Readings:


Lab: Organized Inquiry


Key Questions To Keep In Mind:

 * What is the relationship between community and economic production?
 * When are markets, networks, and communities appropriate institutions for production?
 * How can self-interest be leveraged to produce public goods?

Special Guest Sarita Yardi

Key Questions To Keep In Mind:



Session Fifteen: May 9

Theme: Virtual Community and Real Life


In what ways do our online social activities change our lives, relationships, communities?

As we enter the second decade of the totally mobile social network, shall we pause to think about what changes in our lives might be more beneficial than others -- and consider what control we have over our communication practices, design of technologies, values?

Required Readings:


Recommended Readings:


Student Group Presentations


Discussion:


Key Questions To Keep In Mind:



Session Sixteen: May 16

Final Exam

Page Last Updated: Jun 21 9:05pm by Howard Rheingold

Attachments for this page:

Log in
Socialtext v4.0.0.8