Search results

Following the mass closing of US schools during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the authors noted an increase in discourse among literacy teachers and literacy coaches on social media platforms. Over a period of 9 months, the authors followed the interactions and work of social media scholars on the Twitter platform. In reflecting on Craig's (1995; Craig, Curtis, Kelly, Martindell, & Perez, 2020) illustrative pillars of knowledge communities and Brock's work on black cyberculture, we use narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) to: (1) explore the elements of social media scholarship and (2) reflect on how active engagement in social media scholarship aids in the development of online knowledge communities that amplify and sustain the work of black womxn scholars.

This paper identifies patterns of online stratification based on cultural values and beliefs among internet users in Britain.

Using a nationally representative random sample of respondents from the 2013 Oxford Internet Survey, we identify groups of individuals who share beliefs about the internet.

Each group represents a distinctive cultural perspective on the internet: e-mersives are fully at home in and positive about the digital environment; techno-pragmatists use the internet for instrumental and work-related purposes; the cyber-savvy use all aspects of the internet, but are also primed to be aware of online risks; cyber-moderates are blasé, neither strongly positive nor negative about the internet; and adigitals harbor overwhelmingly negative beliefs and attitudes about the internet. These cultures are largely unrelated to socio-demographic factors, but appear to be shaped by experience online and general dispositions toward learning, and have major implications for patterns of internet use.

These cultures of the internet are significant because they suggest that stratification online is strongly influenced by cultural values and meaning because they influence social mobility, skill development, and digital choice.

When examining the issue of consumers in cyberspace, there appear to be two recurring narratives. One refers to the unidimensional perspective of marketing and how marketing tries to annex the cyberspace and regards the consumer as fair game in its profit‐seeking enterprise. The second narrative views consumers as trying to use cyberspace as a place to exercise their freedoms, establish their identities and use the cyberspace as a lifeworld in a Habermasian sense. This paper is an attempt to explicate this tension.

A century ago, the ancestors of modern computers were largely devoted to analysis of social data, but sociology and computer science diverged, and today they need to be reunited. This conceptual chapter argues for the development of an integrated social-information science, in order to understand and develop socio-technical information systems, to explore and extend recommender and reputation systems, to establish the cultural basis for flourishing virtual worlds, and to deal with revolutionary issues concerning intellectual property rights. It suggests that three forms of human–machine collaboration will become increasingly important: (1) partnerships between humans and information technology, (2) cultures jointly created by the human mind and information technology, and (3) environments where humans and machines cooperate.

This article engages with the question of the otherness of cyberspace, VR, and hypertext, and how they are distinguished as “new” from “the traditional.” It begins by noting how this “new” present is distinguished by familiar binary oppositions like now vs. past and modern vs. traditional which rely on the notion of a new that is uncontaminated by the old. Both our enthusiasm for the singularly liberating nature of this new future as cybertechnophiles, and our Luddite resistance to its singularly fascistic and panoptic encirclement are similarly informed by this binary opposition. The paper then notes how the other in this opposition is a “domestic other.” Thus we always-already know what the other is all about. Arguing that if the other were radically other and not “domesticated,” one could not give an account of it in this way, the paper concludes that such alterity requires a rethinking of how one knows the other. The difference between this “wild” other and the “domestic” other is not an external difference but is radical; it is at the root. Therefore, our notions of space, reality, and text need to be complicated and rethought to accommodate what they seem to oppose: cyberspace, virtual reality, and hypertext.