Week 9 F08

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Week 9


Contents

[edit] Week 9

  • Notes
    • Class canceled next week (ASIST)
    • Solove online, read Ch 5, 6, 7 (by 11/3)
    • Ning is failing - lets try something different
      • Send me a reading question (by email, for the 11/3 class)

[edit] Prompt reading

[edit] Exercise - Project Proposals

  • Provide a brief overview of your project
  • Present 1 or 2 questions for "brainstorming" - class will provide feedback.

[edit] Networks, Personal and Portable

See Lecture

  • Social Affordances of Technologies
  • Technology can change:
    • Social Relations
    • Social Structure

[edit] Social Affordances

  • Broader Bandwidth (greater synchrony, presence)
  • Global connectivity (greater access, proliferation)
  • Communities that transcend the group and locality
  • Transition away from door-to-door and place-to-place relationships, to more person-to-person relationships
    • The shift to person-to-person and role-to-role interaction
    • Door-to-door to place-to-place

[edit] The shift to network community

      • Multiple social milieus
      • Decreased control by milieu of inhabitants behavior
      • Decreased commitment of milieu to inhabitants well-being
      • Requires individual maintenance of spare ties
      • Ability to quickly re-establish relationships with "neglected ties"
      • Lower proportion of interactions based on "ascriptive" characteristics (age, gender, race) and increased interactions based on "achieved" characteristics (lifestyles, shared norms).
      • Fostering of cross-cutting ties (link and integrate milieus)
      • Increased number of milieus to get involved with
      • Reduced sense of plapable group memberships that foster a sense of belonging
      • Reduced identity pressures for group belonging
      • Increased opportunity through globalization
      • Increased emphasis on position within networks
  • Community gets domesticated (Ties turn inward, as people interact without regard to local geography)
  • Domestication of the internet (Glocalization, we turn inward to engage in relationships)
  • Controlling connections to resources (A more fluid access as people engage between networks)

[edit] Networked Individualism

  • Person-to-person networks.
    • This is a shift from place-to-place networks, in which our devices and conditions of access allow personalized networks of communication, cutting across space and place.
    • Individuals allowed to live unconstrained by distance
  • From interhousehold networks to interpersonal networks
    • The encroachment of the network into the house robs it of its placeness
  • Mobile-ization
    • The mobile device affords liberation from both place and group
    • The mobile device allows one to create "place" at any place
  • Computerization (Change in personal and familial relations due to ubiquitous computing and access)
  • Is community viable online? Can true community be found online?

[edit] Wellman's questions

  • Are community ties/networks viable online?
  • Is the offline-online dichotomy overdone?
  • Are good online relationships equivalent to good face-to-face relationships?
  • Will CMC become more transparent?
  • Can online relationships be good enough?
  • Are relationships based on online communication as authentic?
  • Will the internet promote two-person interactions at the expense of group interactions?
  • Will people still feel connected/responsible for the community?
  • To maintain anonymity/freedom will people not want to be always connected?
  • Does the person-to-person shift mean people can live anywhere?
  • Will less-developed countries suffer a digital divide?
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