Category Archives: Cyberspace Sociology

Coursenotes: SOCI221 Meeting 2

SOCI221/2AA – Sociology of Cyberspace

Meeting 2: History

September 15, 2014
Slides: http://slides.com/enkerli/soci221mtg2

Logistics

  • Online texts
  • Need to be on campus, in most cases
  • Can download all at once
    Can do VPN http://lar.me/vpnconu
  • Also coursepack volume, H–1132, library…
  • References on Moodle

Work for the Course

  • Contributions (degree of engagement, putting yourself in…)
  • Reflection posts (working with material, sharing insight…)
  • Activities (hands-on, put into practice…)
  • Exams (define concepts, explain position, contrast terms…)

Podcasts

This Past Week

  • “Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.” – Kevin Kelly, via Stowe Boyd http://lar.me/1at

Online History Activity

  • Noticed Patterns?
  • What has changed?
  • Has society changed in sync?

Required Texts

  • Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly, 1945. http://lar.me/2z8
  • Leiner, Barry M. et al. “A Brief History of the Internet.” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 39, no. 5 (2009): 22. doi:10.1145/1629607.1629613. http://lar.me/2–9

Vannevar Bush

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly, 1945. http://lar.me/2z8

Technology and Prospective

  • War context
  • Knowledge Management
    • Power of intellect
    • Shoulder of Giants
  • Scale

End of an Era?

  • Industrial Era
    • Productivity
    • Rationality
  • Post-industrial
    • Hyperproductivity
    • Knowledge work (call centres…)
    • Information Overload
    • Getting Things Done (GTD) http://lar.me/2-a

Engineering mindset

Inspiration

Leiner et al.

Leiner, Barry M., Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, and Stephen Wolff. “A Brief History of the Internet.” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 39, no. 5 (2009): 22. http://lar.me/2–9

Internet Infrastructure

  • Plumbing
    • Commodity
    • Reliability
    • Scalability
    • Flow
  • Information Technology
  • Academics
    • Open publication
    • Vendors and inventors

Internet Infrastructure

  • Beyond Web
  • Finances
  • Social aspect
    • Email
    • Community
  • Political Aspect
    • Who decides?
      • “Core group of designers”
      • Global Inequalities

Sociology Crash Course

  • WMDs: Weber, Marx, Durkheim http://lar.me/wmd
    • Symbolic Interactionism, Conflict Theory, Functionalism
    • Dialogue, Inequality, Stability
  • Group, socialization, role, status…
  • Power, control, conformity, norms, deviance
  • Culture, subculture, counterculture
  • Feminism as key

Cyberspace Background

Cyberspace Precursors

  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  • Charles Babbage
  • Alan Turing
  • Norbert Weiner 1948 “Cybernetics”
  • J.C.R. Licklider 1962 “Intergalactic Computer Network”
  • Vernor Vinge 1981 “Cyberspace”

Macy Conferences

The Macy Conference Core

  • http://lar.me/2za
  • Gregory Bateson
  • Lawrence K. Frank
  • Frank Fremont-Smith
  • Margaret Mead
  • Arturo Rosenblueth
  • Warren McCulloch

The Macy Conference Attendees

  • Lawrence Kubie
  • Walter Pitts
  • Paul Lazarsfeld
  • John von Neumann
  • Norbert Wiener
  • Clyde Kluckhohn
  • Roman Jakobson
  • Claude Shannon

Macy Subconference

  • Talcott Parsons
  • Robert Merton

Making Links

Cyberspace Mindmap
(PDF version)

Next Week

Cultural Background

Online Exercise/Activity: Before and After

  • Pick a topic related to social change in an online world (education, dating, labour, publishing, networking…).
  • Find someone who lived through a transition to an online world.
  • Ask that person about the change topic, describing a bit of the context for the course.
  • Share a quick piece of insight from that interaction, not giving away any personal detail.

Required Texts

  • Silver, David. “Looking Backwards, Looking Forward; Cyberculture Studies 1990–2000.” Web Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age. Oxford University Press, 2000. http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp
  • Turner, Fred. “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community.” Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (2005): 485–512. doi:10.1353/tech.2005.0154. http://lar.me/2zb

Silver

Silver, David. “Looking Backwards, Looking Forward; Cyberculture Studies 1990–2000.” Web Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age. Oxford University Press, 2000. http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp

Silver

  • Three phases in Cyberculture studies
  • Enthusiasm to critical thinking
  • Frontier mentality (Web’s soul, “perpetual beta”, libertarianism…)
  • Globalization
  • Conformity
  • Hypertext to UI/UX

Turner

Turner, Fred. “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community.” Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (2005): 485–512. doi:10.1353/tech.2005.0154. http://lar.me/2zb

Turner

  • Counterculture
    • Peace
    • Community
    • Capitalism
  • Howard Rheingold
    • Virtual Community

Stewart Brand

  • Merry Pranksters
  • Whole Earth Catalog
  • The WELL
  • Global Business Network (GBN)
  • Long Now Foundation
Furthur, Photo by Joe Mabel
Furthur, Photo by Joe Mabel

Furthur, Photo by Joe Mabel

Acid Test

 

Coursenotes: SOCI221, Week 1

SOCI221/2AA – Sociology of Cyberspace

Meeting 1: September 8, 2014

Today

  • Getting acquainted
  • Knowing what to expect
  • Exercises
  • Prepare for next week

Getting to Know One Another

Building Connections

Classroom activities: you have/had to be there…

Discussion

What can sociology provide in the study of Internet?

Exercise

Online History

  • Go back to your early online history
  • What has changed?
  • Post something short

Call Me Alex

Alex’s Info

Alex’s “Cyberspace” Biography

  • Twenty Years Online
  • Pre–1993: Dabbling
  • Since 1993: Intense
  • Social media involvement
  • Geek ethnographer
  • Social Web course
  • Community manager

Alex’s Teaching

  • Diversified teaching
  • Constructivism
  • Applied work: participatory action research
  • Emphasis on appropriation

Active Learning

Gym Analogy

  • Own project
  • Effort, practice, and improvement
  • Personal trainer, not coach, drill sergeant, or employer
  • Ask questions

Peer Learning

  • Mutual help
  • Culture of sharing (“gift economy”)
  • Diigo
  • Interactions
  • Peer assessment
  • Forums

Teaching as Community Management

  • Building learning environment together
  • Community?
  • Enabling action
  • Learning network

This Course

Sociology of Cyberspace

What Do We Mean by “Cyberspace”?

Social dimensions

  • Geek Culture
  • Digital divide
  • Inequality
  • Class
  • Gender
  • Race
  • Democracy
  • “Digital Natives”
  • Education
  • Digital literacy
  • Diversity
  • Digital ethnography
  • Posthumanism
  • Appropriation
  • Communities
  • Social identity

This Semester

  • Somewhat hands-on
  • Exercises
  • No need for technical skills
  • Critical thinking

Coursepack

  • All texts available online
  • Diverse
  • Deep sociology
  • Average of two texts per week
  • Study smart: skim then focus
  • Texts as toolbox
  • Find something to share, to discuss

Course Policies

  • Contributions
  • Regular attendance expected
  • Online submissions before class
  • Late penalty
  • No extra credit

Contributions

  • What do you bring to the course, apart from what’s expected?
  • Active
  • Not necessarily “vocal”
  • Not necessarily in-class
  • Partly self-assessed (October 13)

Reflection Posts

  • Sociological insight
  • Active reading: toolbox, conversation starters
  • Making links
  • Outside sources (including videos, tweets, pictures…)
  • Aggregate grade (on 20) by Alex, at the end
  • Ok if miss one

Qualitative peer-assessment

  • Excellent: ~90%
  • Very Good: ~80%
  • Good: ~70%
  • Average: ~60%
  • Not Good Enough: ~50%
  • Disappointing: ~40%

Activities/Exercises

  • Some start in class
  • More hands-on, informal
  • Also qualitative peer-assessment
  • Aggregate grade (on 10) by Alex, at the end
  • Ok if miss one

Exams

  • Essay-type questions, but shorter
  • Compare and contrast, support argument…
  • In-class midterm (October 20)
  • University-scheduled final

Coming Up

Context Is Key

Required Texts

Vannevar Bush

As We May Think

Pre-Internet

  • From destruction to knowledge
  • Technology and the mind
  • Prospective
  • Memex
  • Partial inspiration for the Internet

Leiner et al.

Brief History of the Internet

Historical Background

  • Time depth
  • Technological details
  • Plumbing analogy
  • Skip sections
  • Focus on sections 6 (The Role of Documentation) through 9 (History of the Future)
  • Explicit issues: key people, communication between humans, defense, fits and starts, adoption patterns…

Between the lines:

  • Where did it happen?
  • Who made decisions?
  • Society shapes technology or technology causes social change?