I hope to get things going here soon with my summer class on
Communication in Online Communities. And so, I welcome the students in that class who will be providing most of the content. I also welcome friends (many of whom I only know online) who might check in to see what sorts of things we are talking about. And then there are those folks who simply "stumbled upon" this site -- a special welcome for them and a thankful prayer for serendipity. We find each other by different and strange routes, but we find each other.
For a ridiculously few number of weeks (four!), I and about 23 students will be reading a lot and talking a lot and writing a lot about online communication. Having just introduced ourselves, I can attest that we range from the cyber-savvy to the techno-doubtful with a fair number of us landing somewhere in the middle, ready to learn more about online activities that already consume a significant portion of our lives.
For my part, I acknowledge that I am hardly an expert in "new" and social media. Moreover, this is not principally a course/blog/conversation conducted within a
media frame. Rather, I am interested in the human aspects of how we
use this technology -- the dual and sometimes conflicting narratives of how we "make do" with it all while it is changing us. And, well, not. Already in the class, we wrestle with questions about whether these practices are really new or just variations on behaviors we've engaged in for years (decades? centuries?) absent the mediation of something with microchips and processors.
Because I come at this topic with a Communication Studies background, I have organized the course around three familiar areas of that discipline. I am interested in how computer mediated communication affects
interpersonal communication, functioning as a tool for, well, social communication and building networks of relationships. I am also interested in how we use it to participate in the public sphere, seeing its
rhetorical implications for both social activism and political communication. And finally, I am interested in how we use it for aesthetic communication and
performance.
In the next three weeks, we'll be posting short essays from students in the class as they contemplate various aspects of online communication. Over on the left hand side of the screen I've posted links to the books we will be reading as well as the publicly available web articles and blog sites. We'll be supplementing these with a series of articles and other readings for which I do not have the rights to make publicly available; however, I am more than willing to share citational information.
Please feel free to comment and ask questions. And please fee free to contact me if you would like to contribute to or participate on this blog. I don't know if it will have "legs" beyond the end of the course, but I hope it is an interesting conversation either way.
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