A couple social media course descriptions came up today when I checked my recently-neglected feed reader. Both courses are taught by people whose writing I follow and respect: Trebor Scholz and Fred Stutzman. I thought it might be interesting to look at their respective reading lists to see what these courses are emphasizing in the study of social media.

First up Fred's course, Online Social Networks. These are five of the main texts he chose:

• Albert-Laszlo Barabasi - Linked
  
• Erving Goffmand - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life


• Sherry Turkle - Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet


• danah boyd - "Why Youth (heart) Social Networks" and "None of this is real"


• Clay Shirky - "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality"

Judging by the texts alone, Fred's students will be approaching social networks largely from a sociological perspective. Before going into any further thoughts let's look at a few of Trebor's choices for Web 2.0: What Went Wrong?:

• Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks


• Henry Jenkins - Convergence Culture


• Jurgen Habermas' writing on the internet and the public sphere


• Michael Hardt - "Affective Labor"


• Nicholas Carr - "Sharecropping and the long tail"


• Jeff Jarvis - "Who Owns the Wisdom of the Crowd? The Crowd."

These texts seem to imply a heavier theoretical influence than Fred's course.

One of the most apparent similarities between these two courses is their reliance on texts and writers most known or originating in blogs and blog writing. Fred relies on danah boyd and Clay Shirky, while Trebor looks to Nicholas Carr and Jeff Jarvis. These writers have worked out their thoughts in the very environment that these courses are examining and no doubt have been shaped by this factor. It's not just a curious fact, however, but a recognition that a great deal of contemporary scholarship on social media is happening in and between blogs.

The differing approaches (sociological/theoretical) to the topic is also quite interesting - but I'm not entirely sure what to conclude that academic investigation of these media is coming from these two distinct sources. Library scientists, sociologists, and the poststructuralists are all pumping out fascinating work on the subject. Despite my affinity toward what I'm calling the theoretical end (among other things, I would have added Deleuze's "Postscript to Societies of Control" to both syllabi), I would have been pleased to see more intermingling between the two to take advantage of the interdisciplinary play between the different approaches.

Either way, both strike me as interesting courses.

Posted by Nathan at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...just quite busy lately. A new entry later this week.

Posted by Nathan at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's been an interesting exchange occurring on the nettime mailing list discussing the merits of subjecting blogging to serious analysis. Though the thread is now a few days old, I've only just had the chance to read it. Before I move into my own take on the issue, I want to point out that I do recognize the irony of blogging a response to a mailing list thread critically analyzing the very same practice. Perhaps I feel more comfortable opining in a medium that is generally viewed as more public.

The question of the legitimacy of the study of blogging was raised when one participant compared a blog to a pen: a mere tool of expression that does not limit or direct its uses. The respondents certainly addressed this well, but to reiterate, it might be more appropriate to compare the keyboard to the pen as opposed to the blog. When we use the term 'blog' we imply far more than simply the conventional structure of an individual webpage lumped into this category. Rather, 'blog' implies a network of writers and readers, with individuals very often playing both roles. This is why we might distinguish between a 'homepage' and a 'blog' - the latter implies an assemblage the former merely implies accessibility. The pen/blog distinction is much like that between newsprint/newspaper. Yes, a newspaper is certainly no more than the physical item of newsprint and ink, but to refer to a 'newspaper' is to reference the institution (the social assemblage) enveloping it.

So, certainly a pen and a blog are different and the study of blogs is more accurately the study of that which surrounds the raw medium - it is 'blog' as metonymy.

Secondly, the initiating article of the thread itself ("The Banality of Blogging") makes a bit of misstep in its narrow view of 'blogging'. While its analysis is insightful and certainly worth a thorough read, its conflation of personal blogging with all of blogging fails to recognize the different types of networks and, ultimately, assemblages that form around blogs of a different purpose. Personal blogs (by which I mean blogs that are used to express the events of the blogger's daily and emotional life) are quite different in function and network structure than business blogs, political blogs, or tech blogs and so on. The ways these different spheres interact within themselves are often quite different and worthy of analysis in their own right.

To sum up, not only are blogs worthy of analysis as a medium, but this analysis must become more nuanced in order to fully examine its impact.

Posted by Nathan at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In looking for a topic for this week's post, I decided to scour some too-long-neglected sections of my feed reader. There are some feeds in there to which the only attention I've paid them as been the occasional impulse to mark everything as "read" and start fresh. While airing out these dusty nooks, I rediscovered MediaShift, the new media blog for PBS, which is usually helmed by Mark Glaser. When I read it regularly, it was a decent, generalist new media blog. The most recent entry, however, was written by a guest editor, Robert Logan. Logan's entry, "The 14 Messages of New Media", which attempts to update McLuhan for new media was a welcome surprise.

It's been a little while since I've read McLuhan, so while reading Logan's piece, I found myself principally placing his thoughts into the context of assemblage theory as delineated by Manuel DeLanda. Generally, Logan takes a teleological view of media evolution - that McLuhan's thoughts on electronic media have presaged the evolution of what we now call new media. Yet, the assemblage perspective might be a more helpful interpreter of Logan's "14 messages". More specifically it is helpful to see these messages as territorializing or deterritorializing aspects from an ontological view.

Here are his 14 messages and territorializing or deterritorializing role I think fits. Keep in mind of course that both actions are relative to the specific relation or assemblage to which they refer.

1. two-way communication [territorializing]

2. ease of access to and dissemination of information [deterritorializing]

3. continuous learning [deterritorializing]

4. alignment and integration [territorializing]

5. community [territorialiing]

6. portability and time flexibility (time-shifting), which provide users with freedom over space and time [deterritorializing]

7. convergence of many different media so that they can carry out more than one function at a time and combine — as is the case with the cameraphone [deterritorializing]

8. interoperability without which convergence would not be possible [depends on the scale of interoperability]

9. aggregation of content, which is facilitated by digitization and convergence [depends on the type of aggregation occurring and the space in which it occurs]

10. variety and choice to a much greater extent than the mass media that preceded them and hence The Long Tail phenomenon [deterritorializing]

11. the closing of the gap between (or the convergence of) producers and consumers of media [deterritorializing in a broad context, territorializing in a smaller one]

12. social collectivity and cooperation [territorializing]

13. remix culture which digitization facilitates [territorializing globally, deterritorializing individually]

14. the transition from products to services [territorializing]

Clearly, the function of each of these messages is not directly apparent when decontextualized, but on the whole - if we are to take these as the essential qualities of new media - they serve both binding and unbinding purposes when it comes to assemblage. On the one hand, the increased access to geographically boundless and instantaneous communication will increase ontological distinctions between entities; on the other hand, the ethos of openness that defines many pieces of new media culture is a profoundly deterritorializing shift. Singularities are no longer so tightly bound to historically significant assemblages.

What we are seeing in new media then, is a recontextualization (to an extent) of some older paradigms into this environment. Surveillance, discipline, control, subjectivity, and power are all critical, and more nakedly expressed, in what is still in some sense a raw set of media.

Posted by Nathan at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)