Sociable Web Media Course Description
From Collectivate Course Wikis
Contents |
Sociable Web Media
Department of Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo
- DMS528 S, Tuesday/Thursday, 17-18:50pm, RM 235
Short URL for this page:
http://tinyurl.com/ghdtw
Instructor
Trebor Scholz, Assistant Professor
contact | [website http://collectivate.net]
- office hours: CFA 247
Wednesday, 1-2pm and by appointment
Course Description
Over the past ten years the public spheres have been dramatically expanded by participatory web-based technologies. This course will argue for the potential of sociable media such as weblogs to democratize society through emerging cultures of broad participation. It will focus on various arguments for and against this central claim by examining present-day understandings of the public sphere, ranging from theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Alexander Kluge to Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler.
This course will investigate the democratizing potential of the Internet by examining the political participation of citizens who contribute news reports to weblogs and wikis, knowledge repositories such as the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia or the open source software archive Freshmeat, web-based platforms for artistic expression, and mobile wireless devices that allow for political participation such as the organization of protests.
Citizen journalism as a corrective to the mass media in countries has had significant effect in countries such as Iraq, China, the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, and the United States. People post to weblogs and wikis from their desktop computer or from wireless mobile devices in the city.
Online knowledge repositories such as the free encyclopedia Wikipedia are a challenge to copyright. The collaborative effort of many thousands of contributors creates a quantitative and qualitative leap that corporate initiatives cannot live up to. Subsequently, knowledge pools like Wikipedia “out-cooperate” for-pay services such as the Encyclopedia Britannica.
In the arts, participatory cultures are growing. Artists intervene in public spaces, online and off. They send remote-controlled robots into the streets of major cities spraying political graffiti onto plazas. Artists allow participants to SMS messages onto urban screens. Artist collectives like the Institute for Applied Autonomy solicit input from the urban population to create an interactive map of the surveillance cameras in Manhattan. More and more artists become “cultural context providers”: they enable participants to create content within the parameters that they defined.
Cell phones are the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users in developing countries than in the developed world. Simple cell phones have been used as tools to coordinate political actions. Communication theorist Howard Rheingold writes about the “People Power II” revolution in Manila in 2001, where demonstrations to oust then-president Estrada were coordinated spontaneously through extensive text messaging.
The question of political participation in the networked public sphere is central to destabilizing relations of domination. Students who successfully participate in this course will understand the current, intricate, techno-social changes of the public spheres.
"Democratization & the Networked Public Sphere" pairs theoretical reflections with examples; course formats will vary between discussions, student presentations, lectures, and screenings.
- TOPICS:
1) From Jürgen Habermas, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt to Networked Public Spheres
2) A Brief History of Online Group Formation
- OVERVIEW, REALITIES, POTENTIALS
3) Platforms, Environments, & Technologies of Cooperation
4) Art on Platforms, the Artist as Cultural Context Provider
5) Citizen Journalism
6) New Publics & the Future of Content (Quantity)
7) Out-Cooperating Empire: Knowledge Repositories, and "Collective Intelligence"
- CRITICISMS
8) The Digital Divide Is Not What It Used To Be
9) Control & Freedom in the Networked Public Sphere
10) The Future of Content (Quality) or: the Ineptitude of the “Crowd”
11) The Babel Objection, the Death of Geography, Fragmentation, Plural Monocultures
- CONCLUSION
12) Sociable Media: Social Change?
Notes:
In her definition for The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, Judith Donath, describes sociable media as “media that enhance communication and the formation of social ties among people.“ Such media are not new, she writes, “letter writing can be traced back thousands of years – but the advent of the computer has brought about an immense number of new forms.”
The networked public sphere, a term used by Benkler and many other scholars, describes the expansion of the public spheres in the Internet.
Term and Research Papers
Presentation
- Presentations take place throughout the semester
Grading
- Graduate Students
Term projects include one 20 page term paper and two 5 page research papers written during the semester and presented in a sixty minute long presentation in class.
35% Course participation
10% Research paper #1
10% Research paper #2
25% Term paper
- Undergraduate Students
Term projects include one 10 page term paper and one 5 page research papers written during the semester and presented in a thirty minute long presentation in class.
35% Course participation
10% Research paper #1
35% Term paper
- Grade Chart
93-100 % A
86-92.9% A-
80-85.9% B+
75-79.9% B
70-74.9% B-
65-69.9% C+
60-64.9% C
55-59.9% C-
50-54.9% D+
30-49.9% D
Less than 30% F
The Presentation
You will each give an oral presentation about topics related to your project. Graduate students present for 1 hour. Undergraduate students talk for 30 minutes. You'll need to research this both, online and in the library. You should bring books from the library to class and other support material. The collected research on the wiki should also inform this presentation.
Participation
A substantial part of your grade is based on your participation. If you come to class prepared you'll do well. This class requires at least 4 hours of work outside of class per week.
