Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society and Participation

Students of the module might be interested in attending the seminar on "Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society and Participation" by Karen Mossberger (Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago).

The seminar will take place in room 5.6a of Bosworth House on Wednesday 6 May 2009 from 12.30 to 1.45pm. As in previous years, a buffet lunch is provided and all staff and postgraduate students are welcome to attend.

To book a place on this seminar, please contact Suzanne Walker sswalker@dmu.ac.uk or telephone Ext 7780.


Have a look at a book authored by Mossberger and collegues: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Citizenship-Internet-Society-Participation/dp/0262633531


Book description:

"This analysis of how the ability to participate in society online affects political and economic opportunity and finds that technology use matters in wages and income and civic participation and voting.Just as education has promoted democracy and economic growth, the Internet has the potential to benefit society as a whole. Digital citizenship, or the ability to participate in society online, promotes social inclusion. But statistics show that significant segments of the population are still excluded from digital citizenship.The authors of this book define digital citizens as those who are online daily. By focusing on frequent use, they reconceptualize debates about the digital divide to include both the means and the skills to participate online. They offer new evidence (drawn from recent national opinion surveys and Current Population Surveys) that technology use matters for wages and income, and for civic engagement and voting."Digital Citizenship" examines three aspects of participation in society online: economic opportunity, democratic participation, and inclusion in prevailing forms of communication. The authors find that Internet use at work increases wages, with less-educated and minority workers receiving the greatest benefit, and that Internet use is significantly related to political participation, especially among the young. The authors examine in detail the gaps in technological access among minorities and the poor and predict that this digital inequality is not likely to disappear in the near future. Public policy, they argue, must address educational and technological disparities if we are to achieve full participation and citizenship in the twenty-first century."

Lecture 12: Brands, Business & Digital Culture

Advertising 1.0:

• censorship and government regulation (those this still applies at some levels today - China)
• editorial control
• limited choice of information retrieval
• one-way communication

Advertising 2.0:

• looser boundaries and wider parameters
• we are editors of our own content (flickr, facebook, twitter, blogs)
• more choice of information points
• many to many communication

Enter niche markets and the long tail:

"In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.

Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.

What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller's software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.

Particularly notable is that when Krakauer's book hit shelves, Simpson's was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpson's book - and if they had, they wouldn't have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book."

This all leads to what Chris Anderson (a.k.a The Long Tail) terms as "people power":

First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world.

Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.

Class Work: Blog Post

Lecture 12: "I am the Long Tail", Name

In your blog post note your own long tail - tell us where you buy your books, dvds, music, groceries, travel, clothing and where do you get your information?

Include an image or screen capture of one of your online retailers and a link to a place where you access information.

Lecture 8: Introduction to Feminist Theory

Log into googledocs and complete the activity listed here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgfvwnr9_59dkcrr5f5

• Key Theorist: Donna Haraway - her term "god-trick" for the idea that we can be objective, i.e. "see all from nowhere" but we've learnt that we're all situated, becoming subjectivities.
• Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva develop the idea of “situated knowledge”: race, history, culture, gender, class, location all play important roles because knowledge is always constructed through who we are
• Haraway: “the crucial political action that women and people of other marginalized groups must take is to 'refigure the terms of that story', to re-narrate, to 'produce a female symbolic where the practice of making meanings is in relationship to each other, where you're not simply inheriting the name of the father again and again.’”
• Haraway's model = new forms of narrative do not simply subsume the old, but "widen the number and kinds of stories that get told and the actors who tell them."
• “Cyborg writing" as a form of oppositional consciousness.
• Critical literacy work is fundamental to critical engagement with larger structures of ideology & discourse, & to applying lived experience to an examination of relations of power
• Situated knowledge is postmodern, i.e. remains resolutely dynamic
  
  

The links you'll need:

Rosi Braidotti's paper is here: http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm

and I'd like you to choose one of the six born digital fictions from here: http://wetellstories.co.uk/

Any questions, remember to e-mail me: jlaccetti AT dmu.ac.uk

I'll look forward to reading your critical interpretations. Keep in mind these parts of the critical thinking process:


The image is from a presentation by University of British Columbia, Okanagan education professor Phil Balcaen. Have a read here for more information on critical thinking that adds to what we discussed in last week's lecture.

Welcome to the 2009 Digital Cultures Module

Ok, it's not quite 2009 yet but I know you are all eager to get started over the Christmas break.

So, here is a project for you.

I would like you to craft an annotated bibliography of at least 10 texts that we should read as part of our Digital Cultures curriculum, feel free to add more than ten sources. In your annotation please include the following information:

• Main focus or purpose of the work
• Intended audience for the work
• Special features of the work that were unique or helpful
• Background and credibility of the author

Obviously you haven't yet read the work so you won't be able to include the author's or your own conclusions. You can however include why you think we ought to use your chosen resource. Perhaps it presents an unusual point of view or provokes dissidence, but do include a reason.

Since we're talking about digital cultures, try to include ONLY online resources. There is an amazing array of excellent academic research available online - either in journals through the DMU library subscriptions or via open access journals, blogs, newspapers and other websites. Even on Amazon some text is available (see last year's reading list in the right hand column of this blog). You don't have to include an entire book but you can refer to chapters or individual blog posts.

One possible resource might include Lev Manovich's latest which he "published" during his talk at our Future of Creative Technologies conference on 20th November 2008.

Some print books that we will be referring to throughout the module include:

• George Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in a Global Era
• Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text
• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
• Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects
• Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One
• Rosi Braidotti, Cyberfeminism with a Difference and Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory

Also very important is that each of you have a twitter and facebook and delicious account, if you don't already. I'm JessL on all of the above. Please start a blog as we'll be using that in our lecture sessions too along with flickr.

Please tag all the suggested course reading materials with "digitalcultures09" and please send them me too: http://delicious.com/jessl.

Things to keep in mind when you're choosing texts:

• they should align with our topics of feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, cyberculture, creative technologies, critical literacy, digital literacy
• be sure to look at the suggested reading on the blog from last year's course
  
• use any reference style (MLA, Harvard, etc...) but remain consistent

If you know of any web 2.0-type tools/applications that you would like to use (think of tools to facilitate podcasting, videos and other communication) include them in your annotated bibliography (but they don't form part of your ten items to read).


Let me know if you have any questions, concerns or thoughts by adding a comment here or e-mailing me.