Final project proposal

For our project, we’re examining work by Harris Breslow and Nemmie Watson. Both pieces ("Why We Argue about Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.Net Fan” and "Civil Society, Political Economy, and the Internet) focus on the role that virtual mediums have impacted community development on the internet and how that relates to the real world, especially politically.

I myself am a member in an exclusive online community that has developed its own culture over the years. I could very easily write ten full pages breaking my experiences over the year there down. But I think it might be more useful to examine how their theories apply to the concepts of identity and community in political discussions.

The ability to create personas I think is fundamentally changing how people interact with each other online. There is no better place to examine that than facebook.

We think there’s considerable insight to be gained from examining how the nature of facebook and its members has effected the most recent election and what it means for the continued participation of young people in the political process.

Unfortunately, I’m very behind in all of this and Ashley’s still getting caught up with everything she missed. It also doesn’t help that she lives in Chicagoland and I live roughly 4 hours away. It just isn’t possible to get together over break to work together on this.

However, I hope to get most of the work done via e-mail and instant messenger. If this is supposed to be about 6-7 minutes, we think we can split up the project by having Ashley focusing on specific Facebook groups and tools that are used to mobilize people and having Andrew focus on historical data before and after facebook in addition to examining the future impact of social networking on democracy.

The best way I think to approach this is to outline the project’s content and then figure out the appropriate medium to fill it out. I think the most realistic way will be to look at screen capture software that would allow us to show people exactly what we’re talking about. But more importantly, we can show just how easy or hard it is to become connected to other people with similar viewpoints and those that disagree with you.

Hopefully, we’ll have something rough put together by Dec. 4th, but considering that we won’t have a chance to actually see each other again for quite awhile, we would prefer that our presentation be shown the next week on Dec. 9.