Week 8: Crafting Arguments, Learning CSS, and Understanding Networks

All of you came to class last Wednesday with great ideas for your tap essays, and I can’t wait to see how your essays take shape over the next few weeks. Now that you have an approved topic for your essay, you should take what you learned using Tapestry to reformat someone else’s words and apply those lessons to your own tap essay. Tapestry may not be the best application for drafting your essay, but don’t forget about Tapestry’s affordances and constraints as you write. Remember: concision, pacing, and selective emphasis are incredibly important to the success of your project.

Your homework for spring break is to produce a first draft of the text for your tap essay and begin collecting images that you might use to enhance your essay. When we come back next week, we will pick up where we left off in Week 7. Here’s how we’ll spend our time in class:

On Monday, we’ll begin by looking at the tap essays of famous political speeches that you worked on before spring break. Don’t worry about polishing your essay, but come to class ready to show us at least a few screens that you created. Afterwards, we will conduct workshop to learn how to customize your tap essays using cascading style sheets (CSS). Please bring an electronic copy of the text you’ve drafted for your own tap essay.
On Wednesday, we will discuss the importance of networks in a digital society. Please be ready to discuss Net Smart, Chapter 5 (pp. 191–238), in class. No later than Tuesday night, leave a comment on this post containing a passage from the text you’d like to discuss in class, along with your analysis (or rebuttal) of that passage.

I will be at a professional conference for the remainder of spring break, but you can reach me via email if you have any questions as you draft your tap essay. If you’d like to chat about your project next week, please come see me during my regular office hours (T 1–4, W 9–12).

9 Responses to "Week 8: Crafting Arguments, Learning CSS, and Understanding Networks"

Becca says:

March 18, 2013 at 11:11 pm

pg. 202 on iPad: “Passionate users of social media tools such as email, blogs, microblogs, and wikis eagerly send personal or public messages, post strongly felt opinions, or contribute to community knowledge to develop partnerships, promote cultural heritage, and advance development….The results are vast, complex networks of connections that link people to other people.”

These networks can be helpful and hurtful. At the beginning of the chapter the Six Degrees of Separation notes how people are separated by roughly six other people. This shows just how fast these networks can work and social media posts can travel. As a Public Relations major, I am well versed in networking. I have used networking to get an internship as well as other things to help progress my career. Websites like LinkedIn do just this for the professionals in the world. Networking is helpful in that it can further a career. Networking can become hurtful when used improperly, though. When people post inappropriate things on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., that person may face consequences. Companies monitor these social media tools where their potential or current employees post public messages. They can easily fire or write off any employee because of these posts. When you want to share your opinion and it doesn’t match well with your company’s or your company does not approve of it, networking can in turn be hurtful to your career.
1. Beth says:
  
  March 19, 2013 at 9:24 pm
  
  That’s the reason why I rarely post anything actually personal to Facebook. I stay out of political arguments on fb, and don’t swear or angry post. (These things are all reserved for my other blog – one that doesn’t have my name on it). Having a ‘digital self’ that doesn’t have your name flashing everywhere can be quite useful – I feel like I post more like ‘myself’ when I know that my parents and future employers aren’t going to be reading it.
Catherine says:

March 19, 2013 at 4:11 pm

I agree with Becca, when it comes to social networking, the line between helpful and hurtful can be very thin. While social networking is a great way to connect with potential employers, you have to be careful of how you portray your “digital self.” Social media can either strengthen or weaken your chance of getting or maintaining a job.
Jonathan says:

March 19, 2013 at 9:58 pm

Near the end of the fifth chapter, Rheingold sets out to define in a 140 character tweet the method by which one may develop a personal learning network (PLN). The tweet which he arrives at lists eight processes: “explore, search, follow, tune, feed, engage, inquire, and respond” (page 228, under the heading “Tuning and Feeding Personal Learning Networks”).

I specifically took this quote out of all the information presented in the chapter to draw attention to the fact that we will all inevitably be set loose from our structured, educational grounding here at Virginia Tech, and when this happens we need to realize that it will be up to us to foster our own personal learning network. After graduation the responsibility will fall to each of us to maintain a means of furthering our knowledge / expertise through a PLN, as Rheingold details. We will be left in the world without the ability to wake up and go to class to learn the next great skill or idea in our field of study; for this reason I believe that the first step (explore) is the most pivotal. We will have to be the drivers of our education; consequently, we must explore those topics which spur / inspire us into action, creativity, and innovation. This is where online networking comes into play, as we find ourselves alone in our pursuits we will be able to turn to those who share a common passion and establish relationships / friendships of mutual social and inspirational benefit.
David says:

March 19, 2013 at 10:20 pm

Social network analysis (SNA) of public health data has recently suggested that if your friends’ friends (few or none of whom you actually know) are obese, smoke, or are unhappy, you are more likely to be obese, smoke, or be unhappy. University of California at San Diego political scientist James Fowler and Harvard Medical School sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis reported startling research results in “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis over 20 Years in the Framingham Heart Study,” strongly indicating that people’s happiness is influenced by how happy their friends, neighbors, and coworkers are. 9 The investigators (who stipulate that happiness is, of course, the product of multiple factors) took advantage of a research database (the Framingham Heart Study) that happens to contain data about people’s health and behavior over a period of twenty years, along with data about their social networks that made it possible to use SNA to explore their relationships. According to Fowler and Christakis, friends of friends’ friends have about one-third as much influence as people you know directly. The surprising implication is that at least part of your happiness might depend on people you never met. The research on what has come to be called social contagion also linked obesity, smoking, substance abuse, and other behaviors to social graphs. 10 This research is recent, and conclusions have to be regarded as tentative until others replicate the results with further data, but these findings strongly highlight that network awareness might be vital to your health and happiness.

Rheingold, Howard; Weeks, Anthony (2012-02-24). Net Smart (pp. 197-198). MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

This example is not particularly relevant to our class, but I think that if you look at it from a communication standpoint you can see how influential our network connections are. Peoples networks control the way we interact and react with others. I found this interesting because of how our second connections are just as important as our first, which I would have never thought about. This is something to think about when we are connecting with certain people online as well via Twitter and Facebook. If we are aware and conscious of our decisions online and who we connect with then we may be better off.
Sangji says:

March 19, 2013 at 10:34 pm

Rheingold states “another way to look at how online social capital works is the empirically validated value of paying it forward: doing favors for strangers in a network with no anticipation of direct reciprocation” (216). I completely agree with this way of looking at social capital because I’ve experienced it so many times; I’ve benefitted online from countless people who I don’t even know from information or resources that they posted in the past, whether it was on YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo Answers, or a blog. The people who posted these probably weren’t expecting any type of reciprocation from me, but I’m sure that they have also received help from people that they didn’t give any sort of payment to.
Ron Schuetz says:

March 19, 2013 at 10:41 pm

On page 212(56%) on the iPad, he describes his own daily activities, “My own daily activities today offer a window into how…The Web is no longer a special place but rather part of most of what we do.” It is interesting to actually sit down and think about how much of the internet we actually use in a single day, often without even thinking about it and we take it for granted. He is completely right; most people do as much if not more things online or on a computer than not. Whether it be a search for information, communicating, shopping, etc. we usually prefer going to the web first. I’m not saying its a bad thing, or that I want to stop doing it; it’s just interesting to stop and think about how much we, as a society and individuals, rely on the web and other devices in our daily lives.
Curtis Stanford says:

March 19, 2013 at 11:29 pm

“Small worlds, power laws, long tails, Reed’s law, network contagion, and network societies are the invisible forces driving many of the social and economic phenomena manifesting today in the behaviors of networked publics. Knowing what these phenomena mean will help you understand the systemic transformation that much of our environment is undergoing. Whether or not you take advantage of them, these network characteristics will continue to influence the way information comes to you as well as how you distribute your own messages, the ways people buy and sell and share, the operations of the levers of power, and the manner in which you and others learn.”

Rheingold, Howard; Weeks, Anthony (2012-02-24). Net Smart (p. 202). MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

In the digital marketplace, an idea is worked on or conceived by a lot of people, but the evolutionary milestone is usually brought forth by only one or two people who fully deliver the product. Essentially, this means that only any one technological innovation could have manifested in a number of forms by a number of people. The basic idea is that technological evolution is inevitable. If Darwin didn’t come up with natural selection, someone else would have. What al of this means is that WE’VE BEEN ROBBED OF CHOICE.

If we don’t have the choice anymore, who or what does? This leads us to the idea of technological determinism. This concept refers to the idea that technology evolves independently and our social and cultural values are based on this INSTEAD of the other way around. What does technology want? It wants to be explained how it works (which is essentially professional writing). It wants us to upgrade–upgrade and survive or don’t upgrade and retire.

The trajectory of society is predicated on what technology wants. We bend our will to it; it doesn’t bend its will to us. Example: We have a lot of choices about implementing a digital ballot system for voting. But the choice has already been made that voting will be online. It’s ridiculous to think that we’ll return to paper ballots.

As technology takes over and our lives become easier and more convenient, we approach the Marxist utopia. This is a world where we’re free from backbreaking labor giving us time to do what we want. However, as the technology does more and more for us, what’s left for us to do? Will the ceiling continue to rise?

(One last weird thought: Technological innovation patterns itself around the laws of physics and the progressive rules that state life moves toward complexity. Does this mean that technology and what’s to come is destined?)

**For this post, I drew parallels between our reading and What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly.
Brittany says:

March 19, 2013 at 11:48 pm

“Another way to look at how online social capital works is the empirically validated value of paying it forward: doing favors for strangers in a network with no anticipation of direct reciprocation” (216). I agree with Sangji that this is a good way to look at social capital. I have benefitted from this especially when I need surveys to be filled out. I will post them on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and have lots of people anonymously fill them out for me. Also, I have found that strangers are very willing to help especially if they see mutual friendships. Again YouTube and blogs are full of helpful information that people post with no intention of getting anything in return expect maybe more followers.

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