Course Description:
Have you ever broken up with someone using a text message? Felt your senses extended by a new gadget? Or wondered why trolls troll? In this course, we will investigate new digital technologies and their impact on social worlds across “liberal” and “illiberal” political divides, and the legacies of “first,” “second,” and “third world” area studies models. While the course will begin with a brief overview of old media paradigms (the novel, the newspaper), we will spend most of our time exploring new social kinds (the troll, the hashtag, the GIF archive, the emoticon, the TikTok challenge). Readings will focus on “practical” contributions to conversations about media, but we will bring in classical theoretical texts as needed. The goal is to develop a rigorous understanding of new media forms and to design ethnographic data collection methods for projects that can answer a variety of questions about digitally mediated interaction.
A substantial part of the course will consist of an ethnographic research project on some aspect of digital life that students will design in collaboration with others. Students working independently and in small groups, at home and in class, will contribute to different components of this project. To do this, students will conduct research exercises using “Evernote,” a note-taking application that can be used to create snapshots of public interactions, pool data, and present findings. Group presentations early in the semester will serve as the testing ground for the proposed research project. A conference-style midterm paper on a research topic will serve as the rough draft for a final paper. Additionally, weekly blog responses to assigned readings will be required.
Grade Breakdown:
- Do the assigned readings and exercises and be active in discussing them each class (10% of grade).
- Ethnographic research journal (10%). You will keep an ongoing journal of your participant observation online using Evernote. Resulting snapshots, transcripts and field notes can be used for your own research and shared with others.
- Reading response papers (10%). Due each week (except first day of semester).
These are not graded for writing style. But they must constitute clear evidence that you carefully did the reading, and so are ready to actively participate in the discussion.
- Presentation of preliminary research results (10%).
- Summary, synthesis, extension, and critique of 1-2 readings in first half of class in relation to research topic, 5-7 pages long. (30%)
- Final paper (40%): development of the midterm essay based on instructor and peer comments, and in light of readings covered in second half of class, 10 pages long.
Selected Readings:
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities
Oates, Sarah. Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere
Metzger, Megan MacDuffee and Joshua A. Tucker, “Social Media and EuroMaidan: A Review Essay”
Peters, Benjamin. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
Tucker, Joshua A. et al. “From Liberation to turmoil: Social media and democracy,” Journal of Democracy
Yang, Guobin. The Power of The Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online
deLisle, Jacques, and Guobin Yang, eds. The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China
Varis, Piia. “Digital Ethnography,” from The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication
Habermas, Jurgen. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article”
Bonilla, Yarimar and Rosa, Jonathan. #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States
Juris, Jeffrey. Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation
Manning, Paul and Ilana Gershon, “Animating Interaction”
Gibson, James. “The Theory of Affordances”
Boelstorf, Tom. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real”
boyd, danah. It’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens
Coleman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
Coleman, Gabriella. “Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media”
Gershon, Ilana. The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media
Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture
Agha, Asif. “Large and Small Scale Forms of Personhood”
Briggs, Charles. “Anthropology, Interviewing, and Communicability in Contemporary Society”