Syllabus

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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:


  • Read the assigned readings for Session Two and be prepared to discuss them at our next class meeting
  • Publish two substantial blog posts each week; blog posts should link to something on the Web that is worthy of this class' attention, described in the context of the readings. Be sure to read about the rhetoric of blogging: Blog I
  • Contribute one substantial comment to the blog post of another student each week
  • Sign up on the wiki for two syllabus readings for which you will facilitate discussion, together with two other students, starting with the next class meeting. Each reading will be presented by this team of three students, who will communicate and coordinate among themselves and come to class prepared to present a brief summary of the reading and to facilitate broad discussion, working from questions submitted by students. If there are not a sufficient number of student volunteers by Monday afternoon following each Friday class, instructor will assign students to reading groups.
  • Find two virtual communities -- message boards, Google or Yahoo groups, chat rooms, virtual worlds -- that you can legitimately benefit from joining and could contribute to. If you are a river rafting enthusiast, Star Trek or Jane Austen fan, wine lover, student of modern art, find groups that match your interests. You can look here for virtual community resources. When you find two communities, add links to them with a one to three sentence description here: virtual communities to join


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:


  • Ferdinand Tonnies, excerpts On Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
  • Barry Wellman, The Network Community
  • Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 1988 (New York, Penguin), pp 41-60. (READER ONLY)
  • Ray Oldenberg, The Great Good Place , Chapters One and Two (Page numbers TK) (READER ONLY)

Lab: Deeper into social media


Assignments:


  • Continue to blog twice and comment on other students' blog posts once each week
*An exemplary post

Key Questions To Keep In Mind:


  • What does "what is community" mean?
  • Can community be studied, analyzed, designed, grown, or created?

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:


  • Ronald E. Rice, James E. Katz, Sophia Acord, Kiku Dasgupta, Kalpana David,92004) "Personal Mediated Communication and the Concept of Community in Theory and Practice," in P. Kalbfleisch (ed), Communication and Community, Communication Yearbook 28, Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp 1-20 attached (Instructor's excerpts of Rice et.al.) (class discussion of Rice et. al.)
  • Amy Bruckman, (2006), "A New Perspective on "Community" and its Implications for Computer-Mediated Communication Systems," In Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Extended Abstracts (pp. 616-621). Montréal, Québec, 22-27 April, 2006. available online.
  • Barry Wellman and Milena Julia, (1999), "Netsurfers Don't Ride Alone: Virtual Communities As Communities," in Communities in Cyberspace, Kollock and Smith, eds., Routledge, available online


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:


  • Licklider, J. C. R., & R. W. Taylor. (1968). "The computer as a communication device," Science and Technology, April. Republished in SRC Research Report 61, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1990. Available online
  • Howard Rheingold, (1992) "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community," available online.
  • Fred Turner, "Where the counterculture met the new economy: the WELL and the origins of virtual community," Technology and Culture, Volume 46, Number 3, July 2005, pp. 485-512 available online as PDF.
.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:


  • Howard Rheingold, (1993) "The Heart of The Well," from The Virtual Community, available online.
  • Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar, (1990) The Lessons of Lucasfilms Habitat, available online
  • Trebor Scholz, (2007) "A History of the Social Web" available online


Lab: Wikis for Learning and Collaboration


Assignments


  • Use face to face meetings, email, your existing personal wiki pages, blogs, and blog comments to begin organizing group projects. By the end of next class, each student will be required to start or join a group project.

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


  • What is the relationship between technological and social networks?
  • What is the relationship between the architecture of a communication medium and the social, political, economic characteristics of its use?
  • Why are online social networks popular today and what might they mean in the future?

Lab: Many-to-many asynchronous discussions: Forums


Assignments


  • Contribute two substantial comments in the forum before the next class session -- no more than one of the comments can be made within 24 hours before the next class.

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


  • The Prisoner's Dilemma and Public Goods 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:


  • How do social dilemmas figure in daily life?
  • In what ways do communication media and practices influence the capability to organize collective action?
  • Are humans successful because we are competitive, cooperative, or some as-yet undefined tendency?


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:


  • Sherry Turkle, (1995) "Aspects of the Self," Chapter Seven from Life On The Screen, Simon & Schuster, pp 177-210(READER ONLY)
  • Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , Introduction and Chapter One, (pp 1-50) (READER ONLY)
  • Julian Dibbell, (1998). A Rape in Cyberspace. In My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (pp. 11-30). New York: Henry Holt and Company. available online.
  • danah boyd, 2006. "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace." American Association for the Advancement of Science, St. Louis, MO. February 19. available online

Recommended Readings:


Key Questions To Keep In Mind:


  • What is the connection between identity and performance online?
  • How do we distinguish between virtual social interactions between avatars and physical social interactions between people? How should we?
  • What does the immersion in an always-on life do to human minds, relationships, communities?


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:


  • John Coate, "Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community," available online.
  • Peter Kollock, (1996), "Design Principles for Online Communities," Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society. available online.
  • Amy Jo Kim, (2000) "Purpose: The Heart of Your Community," from Community Building on the Web, Peachpit Press, pp 1-18, available online.
  • Howard Rheingold, (1999), "The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online," available online.
  • Yaniv Golan, (2008) "Incentives in Online Communities"<What are the ways that online communities can overcome participation inequality and increase users’ participation?">

Recommended Readings:


Lab


Assignments


  • Create and customize a Second Life avatar
  • Search for Howard Rheingold and offer friendship
  • Explore Howard Rheingold's Second Life office, where you will find directions to the class meeting place
  • Explore the world, write in you learning journal about your observations about creating your avatar, learning to navigate

Key Questions To Keep In Mind:


  • What are the continuities and discontinuities between community-building in virtual and physical worlds?
  • What is the tension between planning and growing when dealing with human social behavior?
  • How do graphical simulations such as Second Life avatars affect how you think of yourself online, how people interact socially


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:


  • Robert Putnam, (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp 121-181. (READER ONLY)
  • Paul Resnick, (2007) "Beyond Bowling Together: Sociotechnical Capital" HCI in the New Millenium, edited by John Carroll. Addison-Wesley attached.
  • Jyri Engstrom, (2001) "Sizing up Social Capital" in _ Engeström, Y. (ed.) Activity Theory and Social Capital. Technical Reports 5, Center for Activity theory and Developmental Work Research, University of Helsinki 2001., Available Online

Recommended Readings:



Lab


  • Second Life and First Life

Assignments


  • During the following week, meet at agreed times in Second Life.
  • Create an object in the class sandbox, no larger than a basketball, of any shape or texture, link it to one of the readings of the syllabus for this course, and label the object.

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:


  • Howard Rheingold, (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, (Cambridge: Perseus), pp xi-xxii; 157-215. (READER ONLY)
  • Ethan Zuckerman, "Mobile Phones and Social Activism,", available online.
  • Jean K. Min, "First Hand Report on the Korean Elections," available online.
  • Tomi T. Hanonen, Alan Moore, "Alpha users and communities in politics—March 2004 Spanish general elections," available online

Lab: Second Life and First Life


Assignments


Key Questions To Keep In Mind:


  • What is the dark side of a smart mob?
  • Is there a common thread to the stories of citizen-initiated demonstrations?
  • How might the early manifestations of mobile-enabled collective action evolve, the way Macpaint evolved into Photoshop and the text-only Internet morphed into YouTube and iTunes.?
  • Smartmobs Mindmap


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:


  • How do your digital media and online social practices affect the way you think?
  • Where does social cyberspace collide with physical sociality in your life, or in the lives of others?
  • How do you determine whether life online is happier than life without the online part?


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:


  • Sherry Turkle (2007), "Can You Hear Me Now," Forbes, May 7, 2007 available online
  • Katherine Hayles, (2007), "Hyperattention" MLA Profession attached: Hayles-hyper.doc
  • Walter Kirn, (2007), "The Autumn of the Multitaskers," The Atlantic Monthly, November, 2007. (READER and available online)

Recommended Readings:


  • danah boyd, (2007) "Incantations for Muggles," Presentation at O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, February.available online.

Student Group Presentations


Discussion:


  • How can this course work better?

Key Questions To Keep In Mind:


  • Does the shift from community-centric media to networked individualism online (from virtual communities to social network services, from BBSs to blogs, from Usenet to Google Groups) signal a psychosocial shift?
  • What is the connection between attentional, social, and normative considerations?
  • Are you different from your parents because of the way you use media, and will your children be different from you?


Session Sixteen: May 16

Final Exam


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