Spring 2011, Wed, 12-12:50 PM, in 162 Royce Hall
Professor Todd Presner
Course Description:
In 2009, the Tehran election protests were called the first "twitter revolution" because of the role that social media technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr played in disseminating information about the protests. Just this past month in Egypt, the world witnessed, first, how the Internet could effectively be "shut off" and, then, how various communication technologies could be harnessed to publish first-hand accounts of the protests throughout the country. Over 18 days, more than 40,000 individuals published more than 400,000 tweets from Egypt, documenting brutalities and the progress of the revolution. The purpose of this seminar is to examine the use, efficacy, and problems of social media and how these technologies are being used in the expanded public sphere. We will also interrogate whether these technologies promote democracy or if they have a violent underbelly.
Syllabus (this is a work-in-progress: I will add readings and links for each week)
March 30: Course introduction: What is Social Media?
April 6th: A New Public Sphere? Thinking about Twitter Revolutions
- Spend some time on the live streams and twitter archives from Egypt, Libya, and Sendai, Japan: http://egypt.hypercities.com, http://libya.hypercities.com, http://sendai.hypercities.com
- Questions: What is the "social media" public sphere? How "participatory" is it? What roles do social media play in creating knowledge about an event?
- Reading: Malcolm Gladwell, "Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be tweeted" from The New Yorker (Oct 2010).
- Questions: Is he right? How do you assess his argument?
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