With this post we discuss the Preface, Introduction, and chapter 1, “A Networked Public.”
In this post I’ll briefly summarize the text, then add some reflections and questions. You can participate by writing comments here, or through whichever other means you like (Twitter comments, Hypothes.is annotations, etc.).
Tag: book clubs
👓 Our Twitter and Teargas book club reading schedule | Bryan Alexander
The schedule runs as follows:
November 19, 2018: Preface, Introduction, and chapter 1, “A Networked Public”.
November 26: Chapters 2: “Censorship and Attention” and 3: “Leading the Leaderless”.
December 3: Chapters 4: “Movement Cultures” and 5: “Technology and People”.
December 10: Chapters 6: “Platforms and Algorithms” and 7: “Names and Connections”.
December 17: Chapters 8: “Signaling Power and Signaling to Power” and 9: “Governments Strike Back”.
December 24: Epilogue, “The Uncertain Climb.”
Bryan, thanks for the list of interesting and creative ways one could interact and participate in an online book club. It’s a great outline which includes some not-often-seen methods–and somewhat reminiscent of #DS106 work. I hope to see some interesting creativity come out of it.
As I’m looking at this, folks who want a quick and brief background (or who need to be sold on the importance of the topic) may appreciate Frontline’s recent two part documentary which I recently watched [1][2]. Tufekci appears and gives some excellent commentary in it. For additional overview/background, I’ll also recommend her three TED talks which I’ve watched in the recent past.[1][2][3] I suspect they cover some of the details in this book.
👓 Our next book club reading is Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest | Bryan Alexander
How our reading will proceed: in a few days I’ll blog up a reading schedule, assigning certain chapters to a weekly timeline. Then, once enough time has passed for everyone to get an analog or digital copy, we’ll dig in. All posts will be tagged https://bryanalexander.org/tag/tufekci/, and so will be available in that one spot for any reader now and in the future.
From the author’s bio (and it’s pronounced /too-FEK-chee/):
Zeynep’s work explores the interactions between technology and society. She started her career as a programmer, and switched to social science after getting interested in social impacts of technology. Zeynep, who grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, and came to the United States for graduate school, is now an associate professor at the University of North Carolina and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. She’s currently also a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Previously, she was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a fellow at Princeton University Center for Information Technology, and an assistant professor of sociology at UMBC.
This looks intriguing, though other than deeper detail than some of the sources (especially Tufekci herself, who I follow closely) I’ve read over the past several years, I’m not sure what I might gain from this.
Still, it’s almost assuredly reading for the additional details. I’m hoping she has more detail on her work on the the Civil Rights Movement as a precursor to her more digital social media work.