• Social Construction of Technology, • Digital inequalities – Digital Divide and Access, • Economy of New Media - Intellectual value; • digital media ethics, • new media and popular culture.

1. SOCIOLOGY OF THE
INTERNET AND NEW MEDIA

2. • How many good friends do you have?

3. •How many people do you meet for coffee or a
movie?

4. •How many would you call with news about an
illness or invite to your wedding?

5. •Now, how many “friends” do you have on
Facebook?

6. • Technology has changed how we interact with each other. It has turned
“friend” into a verb and has made it possible to share ordinary/everyday
news (“My dog just threw up under the bed! Ugh!”) with hundreds or even
thousands of people who might know you only slightly, if at all.
• Through the magic of Facebook, you might know about an old elementary
school friend’s new job before her mother does.
• By thinking of everyone as fair game in networking for personal gain, we can
now market ourselves professionally to the world with LinkedIn.

7. SOCIOLOGY OF INTERNET
• Sociology is the scientific study of society, including patterns of social relationships,
social interaction, and culture.
• The sociology of the Internet involves the application of sociological theory and
method to the Internet as a source of information and communication.
• Sociologists are concerned with the social implications of the technology; new
social networks, virtual communities and ways of interaction that have arisen,
as well as issues related to cyber crime.

8. SOCIOLOGY OF THE INTERNET: AN
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
• In the late 1990s, the sociology of the internet took shape as a subfield.
• The sudden widespread diffusion and adoption of the internet in the U.S. and other
Western nations drew the attention of sociologists because the early platforms
enabled by this technology--email, list-serves, discussion boards and forums, online
news and writing, and early forms of chat programs--were seen as having significant
impacts on communication and social interaction.

9. • Internet technology allowed for new forms of communication,
new sources of information, and new ways of disseminating
• and sociologists wanted to understand how these would impact
people's lives, cultural patterns, and social trends, as well as
social structures, like the economy and politics.

10. KEY CONCEPTS OF SOCIOLOGY AND
INTERNET
• The public sphere
• By 'the public sphere' we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which
something approaching public opinion can be formed. The public sphere, then, is
notionally a space, one that exists and mediates between the mass and the power
elite, an arena in which power is formed and directed.
• At its most basic, a public sphere, in order to be considered as such, must meet two
criteria, namely that 'access [is] guaranteed to all' and that 'citizens have a right
to confer in an unrestricted fashion' (Sparks 1998: 112).
• Internet has created ‘Global Public Sphere’.

11. ACCESS
• As with any improvement to human society, not everyone has equal access.
Technology, in particular, often creates changes that lead to ever greater inequalities.
• Information poverty has become one of the core questions for the study of the
internet amidst fears that its popularity is exacerbating or actually creating an
information underclass.
• The exclusion of this underclass from the benefits of the new informational order
will be long lasting or permanent.

12. • There are two forms of technological stratification.
• The first is differential class-based access to technology in the form of the digital
divide.
• This digital divide has led to the second form, a knowledge gap, which is, as it
sounds, an ongoing and increasing gap in information for those who have less
access to technology.

13. • Since the beginning of the millennium, social science researchers have tried to bring
attention to the digital divide, the uneven access to technology along race, class,
and geographic lines.
• The term became common in 1996, when then U.S. Vice-President Al Gore
a speech.

14. • At the end of the 20th century, technology access was also a big part of the
school experience for those whose communities could afford it.
• Early in the millennium, poorer communities had little or no technology access,
while well-off families had personal computers at home and wired classrooms in
their schools.

15. COMMUNITY
• Community as a concept was at the heart of sociology's project in the nineteenth
century to understand social changes wrought by the transition to the new urban-
industrial society.
• Jenny Preece (2000) offers a list of definitions commonly used today for community,
including
• shared goals, common interests, shared activities and governance,
cooperation, satisfaction of mutual needs, enjoyment and pleasure, and
location.

16. VIRTUAL AND ONLINE COMMUNITY
• Virtual communities were communities in cyberspace, that they were supported
by, and existed solely in, interaction online.
• This opened up a space for discussion of online community as something
unrelated to, and therefore perhaps opposed to, community in real life.

17. • internet communities should be understood not as a response to changes in the
offline social, but as an example of them, seeing such groups as
• 'a technologically supported continuation of a long term shift to communities
organized by shared interests rather than shared place or shared ancestry’
• In this emergent area, internet communities are examined with a view to
understanding their internal dynamics, the forms of relationship which they
facilitate or foreclose.
• The form of relationships decides the type of any internet community.

18. ONLINE IDENTITY
• Our habits define us.
• But how true is this for our digital habits?

19. • Are we the same online as offline?

20. • In the early days of the internet, it was probably safe to assume that our online
behaviours did not reveal much about our real-world personas.
• This notion was popularised by the
• “on the internet, nobody knows you’re dog” caption of a famous New Yorker
cartoon.

21. ONLINE IDENTITY
• From the beginning, theorists have been fascinated by the question of
• how we develop a persona, and interact with each other in an environment as
devoid of social cues as the early internet.
• Sherry Turkle, whose study of early MUD users (see note p. 119) has become a
landmark text.

22. • For Turkle the 'subjective computer' differs radically from other technologies.
• This is in so far as people use computer and online 'tools’ in search of new
experiences which will change their ways of thinking rather than simply as a
do a predetermined job.
• As a result cyberspace is, for Turkle, a self-consciously reflexive space,
• An arena where 'you are who you pretend to be'

23. • AS per this idea, the online self is multiple, transitory and always in the process of
redevelopment.
• The end result of this process is the development of a global 'melting pot' self.
• The core idea is that as we develop and express multiple characters, drawing on
latent aspects of our personality and 'projecting' them into coherent personas, we
come more and more to 'live in each other's brains'.

24. • Thus she argues:
'With our relationships spread across the globe and our knowledge of other
relativizing our attitudes and depriving us of any norm ... Individual notions of
vanish’.
• Drawing on Foucault, Poster argues that the 'individual is not a natural being, is
not a being centered in consciousness, but is actually given shape in the
that occur in language and in action’.

25. • The concept of the mask
• Dorian Wiszniewski and Richard Coyne in their contribution to the book Building
Virtual Communities explore online identity.
• They point out that whenever an individual interacts in a social sphere they portray
a mask of their identity.
• The online mask does not reveal the actual identity of a person. It, however, does
reveal an example of what lies behind the mask. For instance, if a person chooses to
act like a rock star online, this metaphor reveals an interest in rock music. Even if a
person chooses to hide behind a totally false identity, this says something about the
fear and lack of self-esteem behind the false mask.

26. BLENDED IDENTITY
• This mask perspective is likened to the concept of 'blended identity', whereby the
offline-self informs the creation of a new online-self, which in turn informs the
offline-self through further interaction with those the individual first met online.