#7 Social or Anti-Social Media? The internet, part 1

The internet is the basic platform from which many things become possible. Watch this short and informative video for some of the basics:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8K49dD52WA&feature=em-share_video_user[/youtube]

These days, when people say media, what they mean is social media. This has become one of the fastest growing forms of interaction and has had many repercussions. As Michael Wesch pointed out, some of these repercussions are about the creation of communities, expressions of self-hood, and the opening up of channels of creativity. By the end of the week, we’ll also consider the potential of the internet for social movements and political mobilization. Before we get there, though, we’ll spend some time on some of the less utopian uses and repercussions of social media.

Our reading for this week takes a darker turn. Here is the first of two articles from the New Yorker:

The Story of a Suicide – The New Yorker

Dhuran Ravi was eventually convicted of invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, witness tampering and hindering arrest, and sentenced to 30 days in jail, 3 years probation, 300 hours of community service and ordered to pay $10,000. There’s a lot to talk about in this story in terms of homophobia on college campuses, and we may get to some of that in discussion on Thursday. But I’d also like us to focus on the media aspect of this story: what specific forms of media are in play here, and how are people using them? One interesting aspect of the New Yorker story is the way the author uses tweets and IM’s as a sort of archive, a set of primary sources from which he pieces together what happened. How effective is that? To what extent can it tell us more or less than conventional sources, like interviews?

Here is the second story (please note: this is a story about sexual assault, and some of the events and quotes may be difficult for some of you to read. If you feel like you shouldn’t read this, for whatever reason, please try to think about the questions on a more abstract level):

Trial By Twitter – The New Yorker

1. Where, for you, is the line between protection of privacy and bringing potentially damaging knowledge into the public sphere?
2. This story also includes many forms of media, including video, photograph, twitter, blogs, text messages. What are the differences in the ways they are used, or can be used?
3. Is there something about today’s media environment that sets us up for stories like this, or is this just a newer version of an older story?

For tomorrow, please read just ONE of these articles and think about the questions.  You may want to just make some notes for yourself. In class, we’ll try to come up with some norms about how people should use, or regulate, social media.