A Sociology of Cyberspace

FINAL ASSIGNMENT

Due: April 6 at midnight via email.

1. Minimum of 6 pages - maximum 10 pages.

2. Topic of your choice. If you chose to do the Annotated Bibliography (which most did), you have already done the hard part of finding and reviewing the articles on your topic. That means that you will use the summary that you wrote at the end of your annotated bibliography, expand on it within the page limit, add an introduction and conclusion, and you are done.

3. If you did the annotated bibliography assignment, please note that I do not expect you to use all fifteen sources, but that I expect you to use at least 6-8 citations in your final paper. That said, it should be easy to use the old citation trick “When investigating the area of __________, many authors have noted a common occurrence of ______________” (Lawton, 2008; Doe, 2005; Smith, 2004). Whereby all three of those authors had similar findings or arguments.

4. If you wrote an analytic paper for your midterm assignment, you will only need to find 6-8 citations for the final paper, half of which can come from the class reading list. I have spoken with some of you who did the analytic assignment, and have suggested that one approach to the final paper would be to expand upon your analytic paper, or one part of your analytic paper that you found the most compelling. That said, the topic will be up to you.

5. Every final paper needs to cite the Internet Society book that we are about to start at least once. Once you read this book, it will be clearer about how easy this will be (she covers a huge number of issues that all of you will be writing papers at least tangentially related to).

6. Late papers will be assessed a 5% penalty per day. Unfortunately, I cannot give paper extensions due to the time constraints associated with end of term grading, so please get started on your final paper as soon as possible (which, if you have done the annotated bibliography, will be really easy).

As always, email me or come to my office hours to discuss any issues you have with this assignment,

Podcast is HERE!

30-odd minutes of pure, unadultarated learning.

Twitter your thoughts as they come up.

Finding Joy Everyday is generally the opposite blogging experience you would get from last week’s pick (which I am sure grinds even more gears); instead of ranting everyday, here we are finding the silver-linings.

It is hard not to be won over by the nice-ness of this blog, and the statistics to prove it - Finding Joy Everyday has the most page-views of any blog in this class (possibly most of them put together). Here are some more!

You know what grinds my gears…today?  I really like how this blog has really lived up to its potential. It is kind of like a personal blog (in that I know more about the author than I would have before), but it is also kind of a novelty blog at the same time (using the blog format to vent about random things). Much of it is very funny, and more than that, most of it rings very true. I look forward to every post.

In class, we talked about this a bit. Here is a pretty good analysis.

When the Internet suddenly collapsed early last Wednesday across the Middle East and into India, it provided a stark reminder of how the Net’s virtual spaces can still be held hostage to real-world events.

Check out this post today on Tea or Coffee?  True story - I read this today while drinking a cup of coffee, and  it made me laugh so hard that had coffee coming out of my nose. Tea or Coffee? Just might be the happiest blog on the entire Internet, and I look forward to every post. Yet, today… today was something special. Bravo.

Check out British Television Ala Lucy, which asserts itself with clarity - there are other good TV shows in England besides Dr. Who, The Office and Coronation Street! A great mix of information, streaming video and witty commentary, this blog will help you through the Hollywood writer’s strike by giving you some other shows to check out. So… check it out!

In class tonight, we watched this documentary called “Growing up Online” - which you can watch online here if you missed class. This documentary was pretty good at bringing up a number of issues that are crucial our understanding of the social web, and we made a master list via small group discussions and then a larger class discussion. These are:

• Online Third Spaces
• Participant vs. Victim
• Technological determinism/control
• the Digital Divide
• Virtual Capital / currency
• Opening up online (self expression comes easier?)
• Time online (too much?)
  • The Internet as “Evil”
    • Predators
    • Risky
    • Addictive
    • Danger!
    • Secretive
    • Unsecure
    • “Wild West”
    • Anarchy

• Digital youth culture (teen culture is digital culture)
• RW Consequences
• RW Escapism
• TRUST
• The constant need/desire for stimulation -> FOCUS!
• The Internet listens
• Impulses
• Living life online
• Education
• Identity
• Privacy (lack thereof?)
• Bullying/Online Safety
• Generation gap - keeping up?
• Annonymity
• New forms of socialization
• Differences between online and offline selves

Check out your classmate John’s class blog, Visual Affection. Today, he posted a music video he produced recently for the Can-con staple Econoline Crush. Neat!

Class, check this 0ut - WordPress just went from 50mb to 3gb for uploading content to your blog. This is really great news - first person to 3 gb FTW!