Monthly Archives: October 2014

Coursenotes, Cyberspace Sociology

Coursenotes, SOCI221 Meeting 7

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SOCI221 –Sociology of Cyberspace

Meeting 7: October 27, 2014
Digital Inequalities and Reputations

Reputation

Reputation Management

By Lindsay Wheeler (Own work) [CC-BY–3.0],

Second Half

Doing Sociology in Cyberspace

Meetings and Texts

  • October 27: Social Inequalities (Kendall and van Dijk)
  • November 3: Social Identity (Halford and Berman)
  • November 10: Generations (Prensky, Bennett, Selwyn)
  • November 17: Ethnography (Coleman)
  • November 24: Cultural Contexts (Horst, Kelty)
  • December 1: Posthumanism (Cool, Tufekci)
  • December 2: Facebook (Lim, Madge)

Since Last Class Meeting

Networks and Inequalities

Activity: Network Graph

  • Identity
  • Types of connections

Required Texts

Van Dijk

Van Dijk, Jan AGM. “Inequalities in the Network Society.” In Digital Sociology: Critical Perspectives, edited by Kate Orton-Johnson and Nick Prior, 105–124. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

  • Digital Democracy?
  • Egalitarian
  • Public Education

Kendall

Kendall, Lori. “Meaning and Identity in ‘Cyberspace’: The Performance of Gender, Class, and Race Online.” Symbolic Interaction 21, no. 2 (May 1998): 129–153. doi:10.1525/si.1998.21.2.129.

  • Social Constructs
  • Identity Play

Next Week

Social Identity

Activity: Online Reputation

  • Take a few quick notes on what you expect to come up in your online reputation.
  • Pair up with somebody else from the class. It’s easier if it’s someone you don’t know so well.
  • Each of you will do searches for publicly available information about the other person. (i.e. “Google” one another…)
  • Report back to one another and post something about the results (not the information you gathered).

Required Texts

Halford & Savage

Halford, Susan, and Mike Savage. “Reconceptualizing Digital Social Inequality.” Information, Communication & Society 13, no. 7 (2010): 937–955. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2010.499956.

  • From divides to inequalities
  • Constructs and essentialism
  • Some ANT
  • Bourdieu and “capitals”
  • Link Van Dijk

Berman & Bruckman

Berman, Joshua, and Amy S. Bruckman. “The Turing Game: Exploring Identity in an Online Environment.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 7, no. 3 (September 01, 2001): 83–102. doi:10.1177/135485650100700307.

  • Alan Turing
  • Turing Game
  • Humanness
  • Who has agency in identity play?
  • Linked Kendall
Coursenotes, Material Culture

Coursenotes: SOCI/ANTH 441 Meeting 7

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SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture

Week 7, October 15 2014

Core Texts: Ylimaunu and Vilar Rosales

Joint Wordcloud

Ylimaunu

Ylimaunu Wordcloud

Keywords

mirrors, street, towns, gossip, century, surveillance, control, urban, swedish, modern, finland, streets, town, finnish, sweden, space, power, monitoring, residents, private, local, communities, monitored, monitor, windows, spaces, observation, neighbours, museum, window, state, panoptic, object, material, gossiping, person, mirror, institutional, individuality, church, authorities, architecture

Complements

Anderson, Classen, Foucault, Gluckman, Habermas, Ingold, Leone, Simmel, Stoller

Vilar Rosales

Vilar Rosales Wordcloud

Keywords

home, domestic, migration, material, practices, objects, consumption, homes, processes, miller, materiality, house, migrations, routines, mozambique, place, physical, contexts, movements, houses, lisbon, furniture

Complements

Appadurai, Birdwell-Pheasant, Bourdieu, Douglas, Gell, Gupta, Hannerz, Howes, Kopytoff, Lévi-Strauss, Marcoux, Marx, Miller, Rapport, Simmel, Woodward

Coursenotes, Material Culture

Coursenotes SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture, Week 6

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SOCI/ANTH 441 Material Culture

Week 6, October 8 2014
Phase II

Project

Part I

  • Due at midnight
  • Feedback to buildup
  • Keep on going on

Parts II and III

Doing sociology and/or anthropology from object

Pretty Open

  • Can be straight up “paper”
  • Can be creative
  • Can be ethnographic
  • Can be experimental
  • Can be content-based
  • Can be quantitative

Well-Informed

  • Academic literature
  • Cite, quote, pay lipservice, and dig deeper
  • Notice patterns
  • Academic dialogue
  • Still empirical

Material Culture as Field

  • Sociology and/or anthropology
  • STS, SCoT, ANT, affordances, consumer culture, sociology of art, taste, archæology, folkloristics, cultural studies, sociomateriality, museum studies, art history, politics of artefacts, sensory anthropology…
  • Assemblage, bricolage, mix, blend

Part II: Presentation

  • More than “show and tell”
  • Sharing
  • Working together
  • Peer-learning
  • May be small group
  • Schedule soon

Core Texts: Prell and Van Osch

  • Case studies
  • Methodology and approaches
  • SCoT on actors and sociomateriality through affordances
  • Less about physical objects
  • Even nonmaterial artefacts (words, software)

Prell

Prell Wordcloud

technology, technological, actors, design, scot, frame, bijker, community, artifact, semiotic, frames, material

Van Osch

Van Osch Wordcloud

affordances, application, generativity, artifact, interactions, applications, visualization, material, artifacts, sociomateriality, sociomaterial, generative, generation, actors

Coursenotes, Cyberspace Sociology

Coursenotes SOCI221 – Sociology of Cyberspace, Week 5

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SOCI221 –Sociology of Cyberspace

Meeting 5: October 6, 2014
From Social Dynamics to Midsemester

Social Networks

Network Graph

By Dusk Eagle CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0

Logistics

  • Contributions Self-Assessement due October 13
    • Active learning
    • Rarely modified
  • Peer-ratings
  • Midterm on October 20
    • Doing sociology with Internet
    • Talk after break

Past Week

Social Dynamics

Activity: Digital Inclusion

  • Relevant factors?
  • Experiences?
  • Diversity of perspectives?

Required Texts

  • Latour, Bruno. “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network Theorist.” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 796–810. http://lar.me/2-o
  • Kreiss, D., M. Finn, and F. Turner. “The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society.” New Media & Society 13, no. 2 (October 12, 2010): 243–259. doi:10.1177/1461444810370951. http://lar.me/2-p

Latour

Latour, Bruno. “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network Theorist.” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 796–810. http://lar.me/2-o

  • Network society?
  • Classical sociology?
  • Agency?

Kreiss et al.

Kreiss, D., M. Finn, and F. Turner. “The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society.” New Media & Society 13, no. 2 (October 12, 2010): 243–259. doi:10.1177/1461444810370951. http://lar.me/2-p

  • Bureaucracy
  • Peer production vs. prosumption
  • Dialogue

Coming Up…

Midsemester

Activity: Network Graph

  • Make a list of ten people with whom you interact on a regular basis (friends, family, coworkers…)
  • Give an initial to each of these people.
  • Separately, list or map out the relationships between these people. Who knows whom?
  • What can you say about this social graph? Is it a dense network? Are you the only person connecting this group?
  • Post a brief thought about this graph.

Contributions

  • Grade on 10 and quick explanation
  • Extra mile? Made a difference?
  • Not attendance or expected work.
  • Not really assignment.
  • May change grade if really out of whack.

Midterm

  • Short answers (a sentence or two): two points each, probably four out of six
  • Open questions (a paragraph): three points each, probably four out of six
  • Apply concepts (e.g. “prosumption” on Facebook?)
  • Show you really understand: explain to somebody else
  • Broader issues, topics, concepts on doing sociology with the Internet

After Midterm

Social Inequalities

Required Texts

Van Dijk, Jan AGM. “Inequalities in the Network Society.” In Digital Sociology: Critical Perspectives, edited by Kate Orton-Johnson and Nick Prior, 105–124. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Kendall, Lori. “Meaning and Identity in ‘Cyberspace’: The Performance of Gender, Class, and Race Online.” Symbolic Interaction 21, no. 2 (May 1998): 129–153. doi:10.1525/si.1998.21.2.129.

Van Dijk

Van Dijk, Jan AGM. “Inequalities in the Network Society.” In Digital Sociology: Critical Perspectives, edited by Kate Orton-Johnson and Nick Prior, 105–124. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

  • Digital Democracy
  • Social Network Analysis

Kendall

Kendall, Lori. “Meaning and Identity in ‘Cyberspace’: The Performance of Gender, Class, and Race Online.” Symbolic Interaction 21, no. 2 (May 1998): 129–153. doi:10.1525/si.1998.21.2.129.

Coursenotes, Material Culture

SOCI/ANTH 441 Coursenotes, Week 5

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Pickering WordCloud

Pickering

Pickering, Lucy (2010) “Toilets, Bodies, Selves: Enacting Composting as Counterculture in Hawai’i”, Body & Society 16(4): 33–55, doi:10.1177/1357034X10383882.

Pickering as Corpus

Distinctive words

toilets (83), toilet (67), composting (31), state (31), water (29).

Selected Terms

Toilets, toilet, composting, state, bodies, water, faeces, body, waste, defecation, urine, dirt, matter, flush, urination, sewers, land, bathrooms, sewer, plumbed, urinating, soil, rejection, home, drop, critique, trees, shit, modern, homes, compost, clean, bodily, sewage, self, privacy, polluting, pee, interior, food, covered, technology, embodied, electricity, waste, tree, technologies, plumbing, plastic, outside, enacting, enacted, dirty, buckets, sites, purified, porous, pollution, plants, nitrogen, materiality, material, leaky, grow, flows, faecal, excrement, enactment, dirt, defecate, closets, cannabis, zizek, venice, unclean, shavings, porousness, pipe, pipes, permeable, organic, materials, lavatories, houses, gardening, fertilizer, excretions, excremental, environment, enactments, dug, design, defecating, contamination, closet, civilization, water-heavy, tub, supermodern, stall, squat, sprays, solid, smells, shallow, septic, selves, scoop, rejected, recycling, receptacles, porcelain, places, placedness, outfalls, outdoors, nutrients, modern’, modernity’, leakiness, lava, indoor, hand-built, growth, goods, gallon, fruit, foods, flushed, fluids, floor, fissure, farmers, exuviae, exposed, expelled, excreta, encountering, embody, drainage, dirty, digestive, defecatory, decorated, cup, crochet, covers, coffee, clean’, cleanliness, cleaned, caravans, beans, rejecting, modernity, anti-modern

Themes and Threads

  • Waste and dirt beyond Douglas
  • Matter, substance
  • Environment, nature, space, sites, location
  • Body, embodiment, enactment
  • Toilet technology
  • (Super/Hyper/Liquid)Modern state
  • Cultural diversity

Suggested Complements

  • Postcolonial Studies 5(2)
  • Gordon, B. (2003) “Embodiment, Community Building, and Aesthetic Saturation in ‘Restroom World,’ a Backstage Women’s Space” Journal of American Folklore 116(462): 444–464, DOI:10.1353/jaf.2003.0061
  • Kundera, M. (1984) The Unbearable Lightness of Being. London: Faber and Faber.
  • Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  • Žižek, S. (1997) The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.
  • Mol, A. and J. Law (2004) ‘Embodied Action, Enacting Bodies: The Example of Hypoglycaemia’, Body & Society 10(2–3): 43–62.