Class Description
The Net is a platform for participatory media. The recent and ongoing emergence of inexpensive, worldwide, many-to-many publishing and communication media, built on the platform of Internet and wireless communication technologies, has already influenced both politics and journalism. This class explores political activism in the Net context, as well as key aspects such as mass media, political communications, and smart mobs: emerging forms of technology-enabled collective actions. We will read and discuss issues, theories and real world examples from the US, Philippines, Korea, Mexico, China, and elsewhere.
We will focus on blogging, online forums and other emerging media forms such as photo-sharing, tagging, RSS, wiki-based communities and read about theoretical aspects of socio-technological networks as well. We will concentrate on two areas: the politcal effect of new media and technology-enabled grassroots activism in the physical world. We can do case studies on examples such as the anti-globalization movement, Indymedia, Wikimedia, ohmynews, the 2004 US Presidential campaign .
The purpose of this seminar course is to become familiar with the latest developments in information and communication technologies in regard to their potentials to enable political collective action and reshape patterns and structures of power in the physical world. In addition to analytic readings, the class will directly engage in collective knowledge-gathering and construction of a public good. Students will engage in social bookmarking and collectively construct a resource wiki on class topics. Students will start from a pool of potential resources via the smartmobs.com blog and smartmobs del.icio.us tag, and will be encouraged to find and tag new resources that are not already in that pool. Students will post links and brief descriptions of their selections on the wiki, explaining in the first comment attached to the wiki page why this entry is valid and useful; others can comment subsequently, and edit the page if necessary. By permission of instructors, participants who are not physically present at class sessions can participate online. At the end of the semester, the wiki will be open to reading and writing by the public.