Blog Post 5 Prompt

For this blog post you must respond to the following prompt (no commentary posts this week).

Your reading for November 15th required you to read a trade book about social media and marketing. Your blog post this week should be a review of the book, which considers the book's value in light of what you now know about culture and social media technologies from taking this course. Your review should include the title and author as well as a link to the book online (e.g. a Google Books page or Amazon listing). You should very briefly summarize the book's points. The bulk of your review should be a critical analysis of the book. You may want to consider the methods used by the author to arrive at the findings (are they adequate? are the arguments trustworthy based on the evidence offered?). You may want to think about what the book does not address - what important issues might be missing? How might the author go about incorporating them into his or her analysis? You are strongly encouraged to put the book in conversation with authors we have read throughout the course. How might danah boyd, Nancy Baym, David Beer, Sarah Banet-Weiser, or any of the other authors react to this book? Offer references to these authors' works to back up any claims you make.

Your post is due by 9am on November 22nd (note that I have given you an extra week past the due date on the syllabus). For extra credit, you may upload your review to a popular book review site such as Amazon or Google Books. Include a link to your online review in your post in order to receive this extra credit.

Blog Post 2 Prompt

For your second blog post you have two options. You only need to choose one of them. Whichever option you choose, your post should be several (3-4) paragraphs long.

1) You may respond thoughtfully to a previous post written by one of your classmates. IMPORTANT: Write this as a totally new post, not as a comment. Your new post should include a permalink to the post to which you are responding. (Ask me if you need help figuring out how to do this. If it's not done this way, I will likely miss your post and you will not receive credit!) After linking to the original post, provide a few paragraphs of new insight that builds off of or offers a counterpoint to the original post. For instance, you may wish to put multiple posts in conversation with each other, or to consider how a post gained new meaning for you in light of a reading assigned since the post was written. It is important that your post be original and offer something new and valuable, as opposed to just containing your offhand opinion of the thoughts presented in the first post.

2) You may write a new blog post reflecting on methodologies and modes of analysis for studying social media. After completing the readings for September 20, do you think there is an ideal method for learning about the relationships between culture and social media technologies? Are some methods preferable to others, in your opinion? Why? Imagine that the authors of the assigned readings are meeting together in a conference room. What might they say to each other about the study of social media? For example, what would Beer say to boyd, Golder, & Lotan about their Twitter article? What would Slater say to Boellstorf about his ethnography chapter? What would Boellstorf think of boyd, Golder, & Lotan's research? (You are not limited to thinking about these pairings - feel free to speculate about any of the assigned authors in conversation with each other.) Try to use specific references from the readings to back up your speculations.

Your post is due by 9am on September 27.

Blog Post 1 Prompt: Your use of social media technologies

Write a post of a few paragraphs reflecting on your own everyday use of social media technologies. Before you compose your post, you may want to keep an informal diary of how you use social media on a typical day. In your post, you can answer any or all of the following questions: Which social media technologies do you use on a typical day and what do you do with them? Which social media do you use most often? Which uses do you find most helpful/necessary in your life? Can you recall your first encounter with social media technology? Which media would you consider to be "social media"? Are you satisfied with the place of social media in your life or is there something you would like to be different?

Your post should be published by 9am on Tuesday, September 13. Please include an identifier in your post so that our class will know who wrote it. You can use your real name, your first name and last initial, your twitter username, etc.