This course is intended to explore the realities of 21st Century social communication, a process that is always already technologically mediated and increasingly commodified. For the first seven weeks of the course, we will be focusing on the similarities and differences between digital and non-digital forms of social communication. With the work of Erving Goffman as our guide, we will explore the effects of communication technologies, primarily Internet social media, on our everyday lives. Does the performance, in Goffman’s terms, of social communication fundamentally change when it is done online? Or are we just acting out the same roles and managing the impressions others have of us in the same way we would in face-to-face interaction? Also, how have the new mediums of online communication (blogs, social network websites, etc.) created new (or maybe not so new) problems for the notion of what is properly public and properly private? After a thorough discussion of these issues, we will transition for the rest of the class into an exploration of the increasing importance of communication in the global economy. No matter what it is called (Post-Fordism, the Knowledge Economy, Post-Industrial, Communicative Capitalism, Cognitive Capitalism), the changes seen in the most advanced capitalist economies of the world in the past 40 years have resulted in increasing attention to the role of information and its dissemination. A variety of scholars and political thinkers have debated the potential of the Internet to lead the world into either a more democratic and creative world or a world capable of distracting us into oblivion. In this class we will interact with these debates, exploring whether so-called Web 2.0 innovations have made us a more democratic and creative society or one whose labor has become increasingly free and politics increasingly non-existent.
SOC 3152 Social Communication Syllabus
