OK. Let’s go. First, the general instructions:

Collaborate with your duo or trio (your partners for the presentation) to write ten blog entries responding to each of the following criticisms of the “digital generation/net gen/YOU” (these are slightly modified from Don Tapscott’s summary on the archived Grown Up Digital website [based on this chapter from his 2009 book]):

1. You’re dumber than previous generations were at their age.

2. You’re screenagers, Net-addicted and losing your social skills, and you have no time for sports or healthy activities.

3. You have no shame.

4. Because your parents have coddled you, you are adrift in the world and afraid to choose a path.

5. You steal. You violate intellectual property rights, download music, swap songs, and share anything you can on peer-to-peer networks with no respect for the rights of the creators or owners.

6. You’re bullying friends online.

7. You’re violent.

8. You have no work ethic and will be a bad employee.

9. You are a member of the latest narcissistic “me” generation.

10. You don’t give a damn.

Here’s an article and podcast about Tapscott’s book that might be helpful to consider to get you started.

Deadline: You need to have the first five entries posted by Monday, March 14, and the last five by Wednesday, March 23 [note updated date!].

Length: Each entry should be about 200 words long.

ALERT: Once you post, consider it published: it may be read by me and marked at any time.

Now here are a bunch of specific instructions to read carefully:

• Since each entry should be written in a consistent voice, collaboration throughout the writing process will work better than each person being responsible for authoring a certain number of entries. As we’ve pointed out in class, communication is the key to successful collaboration. There are a few ways of making this work—it’s up to you to decide how you want to do it, but here are some suggestions:
  • Assign rotating roles: The jobs involved in writing and posting successful blog entries are writer, researcher, editor/proofreader, and webmaster (for lack of a better term… “blogmaster” sounds like a Scooby-Doo villain…).  Agree on who will do what for each entry.
  • Newfangled ways: You could email each other drafts of the entry for feedback, discussion, and editing. You could all sign up for Google Docs and work on your posts completely in the cloud. You could create a draft of the entry within the blog so each of you could add to it before posting.
  • Old-fashioned way: You could get together in person to write and post the entry.  Some in-class time will be devoted to this assignment to make it easier to use an analog communication format (term © TGCHU, 2010).
• Your goals are to create interesting, readable content, and to use the conventions of blogging effectively. Your thoughtful, well-informed, and well-written entries need to be displayed in a format that will get them read online as part of the blogosphere. As Jeff Jarvis has said, “If you can’t imagine anyone linking to what you’re about to write, don’t write it.” Your blog, therefore, should be written in a conversational tone (not too formal, but not 2 infrml lol), and should be about expressing your informed opinion (rather than just informing the reader about a topic—blogs are usually closer to informal essays than they are to informational articles). If you want to survey the blogosphere, try technorati as a starting point. There are tons of places online to go to for advice about writing good blogs, but here are some key points (these apply to most forms of writing as you’re probably already aware):
  • always write with your reader in mind (think of who, besides me, your entries would be read by)
  • follow the KISS principle (especially for paragraph length—not more than eight lines per paragraph is a general rule to follow)
  • create a good title (think “tweetable“) for your blog and a good headline for each entry
  • use useful, reader-friendly hyperlinks in all your entries
• For each entry, first identify and clarify what the specific criticism is before responding to it—and don’t make the mistake of assuming that they are all just the grumblings of cranky geezers. (For example, what does “You have no shame” refer to—attitudes and behaviour generally, posting “personal” pictures on “public” websites specifically, or something else?)
• You’ll have to do research for all of these topics to narrow them down and respond to them in an informed way. First of all, the criticisms are drawn mainly from some recent books; here are some of the titles and some links to get you started (but do some further googling and youtubing):
• • Distracted, by Maggie Jackson
  • The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein
  • The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen
  • Generation Me, by Jean Twenge
• You’ll also need some sources that present the other side of the argument, such as these ones:
  • Nora Young interviews Don Tapscott about Grown Up Digital on CBC Radio’s Spark
  • overview of Plugged In, by Tamara Erickson
  • Generation We, by Eric Greenberg & Karl Weber
  • Digital Natives project
  • The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009
  • “Rethinking ‘Generation Me’: A Study of Cohort Effects From 1976–2006,” by Kali H. Trzesniewski & M. Brent Donnellan
  • Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next
  • Living and Learning with New Media

So, to break it down, here are the steps to follow:

1. Communicate with your duo or trio to come up with a plan for how you’ll get this done.
2. Set up a blog (anywhere is OK—blogger.com, livejournal.com, tumblr.com, and wordpress.com are popular free sites).
3. Send me an email with a link to the blog once it’s live.
4. BLOG.

Maybe it’s not actually one of the most important questions in the world, but it is an important one, because of the increasing role that being online and (more specifically) being social online plays in our culture.  These two websites are currently two of the most popular platforms for building and interacting with a social network, and they each have interesting histories, so that’s why we’ll focus on them.  Here’s what to do:

Write an analysis that answers the following questions in the following categories (use the headings in your paper):

My Social (Online) Self > > > Write a brief overview of your experiences with online social networks, including why you choose to participate in them, or not.

Origin Stories:  The Rise of MySpace and Facebook > > > Compare how each website got its start, including key developers, and chart their growth as companies and their growth in popularity. Include your informed opinion about some of the controversies surrounding the origins of each website.

Social Networking for Dummies:  Comparing the Interfaces > > > Summarize and compare the key features of each website, including their design and functionality.

Who’s Online?  Comparing Users > > > Compare usership information for each website, both in terms of numbers and demographics, including trends over time.

Predicting the Future > > > Summarize your findings about each social network, and predict what the future might hold for MySpace and Facebook, based on their history and competition with each other.

In your report, you must cite the following two articles by danah boyd:

• “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?”
• “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”

You must also cite at least two other sources (mashable.com might be a good starting point besides Google).

Your report must be written in complete sentences and paragraphs, use headings, and be single-spaced.

It should be about three pages long.  Use hyperlinks in your document to link to the sources for your information.

Submit this assignment to the dropbox on FanshaweOnline by 11:59 pm on Wednesday, March 9.

It’s worth 10% of your final grade and will be marked out of 100.

Please let me know if you have any questions or would like any advice about this assignment.

• Read the section “Trends to Watch for the Web” on pages 393-397 in Paul Martin Lester’s Visual Communication: Images with Messages (5th edition)
• Read the blog posting “When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?” by Seth Godin
• Write at least a page that answers the questions raised by these readings, and that quotes and/or paraphrases them, i.e. what’s important about what newspapers do, and what do you think about Lester’s and Godin’s ideas about their future?

Let me know if you have any questions about anything, and submit your responses to the dropbox on FanshaweOnline by 11:59 PM on Monday, February 7.

Anyway, any course called “New and Social Media” needs to consider Google as part of its area of study, so here’s how we’ll approach it.  You’ll be investigating Google both as a company and as a social phenomenon and writing a report outlining your findings and perspectives.  Your report should answer the following questions:

Part 1)  Google Inc.

• Where did Google come from?  Provide an overview of the key developments in the history of Google as a company.
• How does the Google search engine work, and what is its competitive advantage over other search engines? Describe some of the technology and features of the Google search engine, including PageRank.
• If searching with Google is free, how does Google make money?  Provide an overview describing how Google generates revenue as a company, including recent initiatives.
• How successful is Google as a corporation?  Describe the corporate culture of Google, as well as how it is predicted to perform financially in the future.

Part 2) Living with Google

• How do you use Google?  Describe the features of Google you use on a regular basis.
• How has Google changed the world?  Consider the question from your perspective as a student, a citizen, and a human being.
• Does Google live up to its corporate philosophy of “Don’t be evil”?  Outline and evaluate two specific criticisms that have been made of Google and the company’s responses to these criticisms, then explain what your informed opinion is about each criticism.

Your report should be journalistic in style and tone, written in complete sentences and paragraphs, use headings, and be single-spaced.  It should probably be around 4 or 5 pages long. It must also use either footnotes or hyperlinks within the document to give credit to the sources being used.  The deadline for this assignment is 11:59 PM on Monday, January 31–submit it to the dropbox on FOL by then.  It’s worth 10% of your final grade and will be marked out of 100.

Answer all of the following questions in brief paragraphs of complete sentences:

1. Quick! Define “media”!
2. What are three important things to keep in mind when studying new media?
3. What’s the SMCR model of communication, and how are the attributes of new media challenging and changing this model?
4. What are some of the traditional ways that institutions get things done, and what are some of the new ways of getting things done that are made possible by new media forms?
5. How was the internet made possible by war, and the web made possible by humanity’s response to war?
6. What’s significant about Marshall McLuhan’s insights that the world is becoming a global village, and that the medium is the message?

The deadline for this response paper is Wednesday, January 19 at 11:59 PM.

Here’s the poll:

Here’s the survey: