Sociology 230: Internet and Society

All right, I'm going to mail out your graded final exams this weekend sometime. In the meantime, here are the breakdowns of scores and so on.

Min, Mean, and Max exam scores by question & total (w/o extra credit or lateness penalties)
Total Exam Score distribution (w/o extra credit or lateness penalties)
Number of students answering each exam question... as you can see, nearly everyone answered question #1, and most of you did #4 as well. I found it interesting that they were so uneven.
Final Course Grade Distribution

Final exam grades & final grades forthcoming... In the meantime, a little Dilbert for your enjoyment.

"An effort to force spammers to stop soliciting certain e-mail addresses went bad on Monday, after at least one spammer began sending large volumes of unsolicited e-mail to members of a “Do Not Spam” list run by Israeli firm Blue Security."

"Amazon.com Inc. said yesterday that it has dropped Google Inc. as the provider of search engine results on its Web site in favor of one powered by Microsoft, a move that signals a small rebellion against Google but a large gain for Microsoft."

This week's issue of The Economist has a special section on new media - I've put a section of it up on Blackboard - it's called "What Sort of Revolution?"

Note Changes to Tuesday's Readings Below!!!!!!

Our last week of class! (How did that happen?)

For Tuesday, I'd like you to read:

• Kotamraju, "Art Versus Code"
• Peterson & Ryan, "The Disembodied Muse"

Both are in Society Online.
Edit: I decided to axe the Kotamraju article... after a second glance at it, it's not going to be useful for the discussion I want to have.

For your final response paper, please do some web searching and find an example of artistic production that has been made possible by the Internet. In your response, please reflect on how that art form wouldn't have been possible without the 'net.

For Thursday, you should read:

• Bainbridge, "The Future of the Internet"
• Jones, "Conclusion"

Again, both of these are in the textbook.

"Internet carriers would have a free hand to charge the likes of Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc. extra for faster delivery of services to consumers under a bill approved by a House committee Wednesday."

One of your readings for tomorrow deals with a well-known Internet hoax in which a very popular 'blog maintained by a teenage girl battling and ultimately succumbing to lukemia turned out to be a hoax. While we'll be using this event to discuss what it means to be an online community, I thought some of you might be interested in reading a bit more about the details of the hoax.

• Big White Guy was very close with Kaycee and designed and hosted both her 'blog and her mother's 'blog (her "mother" being Debbie Swenson, the woman who perpetrated the hoax). His account (in .pdf format) is extremely detailed and informative.
• Much of the discussion of whether or not the whole thing was a hoax took place on MetaFilter. Read the actual discussion relating to Kaycee here.
• Allen Smith worked for CollegeClub, a social website where Kaycee was an active participant (in fact, the site where the hoax appears to have begun). He has webbed his e-mail communications with her.
• A San Francisco Chronicle news story about the hoax.
• A news story from the Peabody Gazette-Bulletin (in Peabody, Kansas, where Kaycee "lived").

As I said, we'll be using this case to talk about issues of online community - the meaning of it, what it takes to make an online community, etc.

If you downloaded the PP slides for today's lecture before about 9:05 this morning, you might want to go get an updated version - I made some minor changes.

MySpace blocked at a Texas community college.

After connections slowed to a crawl, it was discovered that 40% of the school's Internet traffic was devoted to MySpace.

Judge: Worker can't be fired for web-surfing.

"A New York City employee cannot be fired for surfing the Web from the work, an administrative law judge has ruled"

New Nokia NSeries phones will have Flickr support.

"Nokia and Yahoo! have worked together to provide camera phone users with means to upload and add comments to photos directly from their Nokia Nseries to Flickr. Consumers will be able to connect to their online Flickr accounts without the need to download or install any additional applications."

Microsoft piracy check comes calling

MS is rolling out an application that will verify the legitimacy of their products - if you have a pirated copy, you'll get warnings to that effect. They've been requiring this for upgrades & additional downloads for a while; they aren't using the app to target/prosecute the users of counterfeit versions of the software.

I've gotten a number of questions about what I want you to do in terms of diagramming your social network. Basically, I'd like you to do a quick drawing of the people or groups that you interact with on a regular basis. Show how they connect to you and how the connect to each other.

Here's mine, screencapped from my slides for tomorrow, as an example.

These will serve as the jumping-off-point for a discussion of traditional "community" versus "networked individualism".

For Tuesday, I'd like you to read:

• Wellman, Barry. "Community: From Neighborhood to Network"
• Wellman et al., "The Networked Nature of Community: Online and Offline"
• Norris, Pippa. "The Bridging and Bonding Role of Online Communities"

For your response, please:

• Draw a quick diagram of your social network.
• Reflect on whether or not your network supports Wellman's concept of "networked individualism".

For Thursday, I'd like you to read:

• Feenberg & Bakardjieva, "Virtual community: no 'killer implication'"
• Mesch & Levanon, "Community Networking and Locally-Based Social Ties in Two Suburban Localities"
• Jordan, John. "A Virtual Death and a Real Dilemma: Identity Trust, and community in Cyberspace"

Respond:

• Are online and offline communities comparable? Why or why not?
  

We WILL be having a guest speaker tomorrow - Nicholas Robinson will be coming to give a presentation on file sharing and field your questions. The plan will be for Nic to speak for about 40 minutes and then we'll have this week's student presenatation.