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.

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.

KEY QUESTIONS:

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

Required Readings

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

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.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• 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?

Required Readings

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

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.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• 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?

Required Readings

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

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

"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?*

KEY QUESTIONS:

• 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?

Required Readings

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.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• 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?

Required Readings

Recommended Readings

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.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• 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

Required Readings

Recommended Readings

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.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• 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?

Required Readings

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.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• 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.?

Required Readings

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.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• 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?
• 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?

Required Readings

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?

KEY QUESTIONS:

• 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?

Required Readings

Recommended Readings