"The Everyday Internet" New Writing Seminar Added for Summer Session I

The Everyday Internet

WRIT 089 910

"The Everyday Internet" is a newly added Writing Seminar which fulfills the Writing Requirement (all classes). It is taught by Patrick Wehner on Tuesdays and Thursdays 5:00-8:10 pm. This course is open to all LPS and non-LPS students.

Course Description: For years, internet visionaries imagined a virtual world online separate from our own. Yet many of the most popular uses of digital communications today are grounded in offline interests and relationships. For example, the social networking website Facebook, founded by college students as a way to stay in touch with scattered friends, claims today to have over 175 million active users. As the means to maintain and build interpersonal connections, social networking sites, weblogs, and even conventional e-mail have been widely embraced even as they have been sharply criticized. Some writers celebrate our ability to keep up with family and join networked communities, regardless of distance; others warn of isolation, a decline in civic participation, and even the end of private space. In this class, we will examine debates about our increasingly everyday habits of sharing, collaborating, and communicating online, especially the potential they represent for organizing and producing knowledge. By writing and revising a series of position papers, we’ll explore our own delights, anxieties, and opinions about being citizens of a networked society.