Webb, Schirato, and Danaher – Understanding Bourdieu

Webb, Jen, Tony Schirato, and Geoff Danaher Understanding Bourdieu. Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2002. Print. This introduction to famed sociologist Pierre Bourdieu provides an overview of some of his most important conceptualizations including: cultural fields, cultural capital, symbolic capital, habitus, and practice.  In addition, this work also provides an overview of the different strands of thinking that informed Bourdieu’s work and how his own theories consider larger institutions... Read More

Ng – Rational Sharing and Its Limits

Ng, Wai-Yin. “Rational Sharing and Its Limits.” First Monday 11.6 (2006). 5 June 2006. In this article Ng sketches an picture of sharing based economies in digital environments.  The author argues that sharing often increases the motivation by more sharing; conversely, if sharing declines, the willingness of other individuals in a share economy is also likely to decline; however, Ng asks where the line is between sharing to create more sharing and vice versa.  To... Read More

Milioni – Probing the Online Counterpublic Sphere

Milioni, Dimitra. “Probing the Online Counterpublic Sphere:  The Case of Indymedia Athens.” Media Culture Society 32 3 (2009). Print. Arguing against Habermas’ depiction of the online public sphere as a site of ever-increasing fragmentation and segmentation (2006), but with Habermas’ normative ideal of the public sphere in The Structural Transformation, Milioni claims that the communalization of networked digital spaces actually does counterbalance the disintegration... Read More

Kobayashi, Ikeda, and Kakuko – Social Capital Online

Kobayashi, Tetsuro, Ken’ichi Ikeda, and Miyata Kakuko. “Social Capital Online:  Collective Use of the Internet and Reciprocity as Lubricants of Democracy.” Information, Communication, and Society 9 5 (2006): 582-611. Print. In this article Kobayashi, Ikeda, and Kakuko argue that the internet promotes social capital in that trust and reciprocity are cultivated through participation in online communities.  The authors also point out that the accumulation of social... Read More

DeVoss and Porter – Why Napster Matters to Writing

DeVoss, Danielle Nicole, and James E. Porter. “Why Napster Matters to Writing: Filesharing as a New Ethic of Digital Delivery.” Computers and Composition 23 2 (2006): 178-210. Print. DeVoss and Porter push against traditional disciplinary understandings of authorship and ownership in this essay.  Specifically, the authors argue that p2p file sharing in general – and Napster in particular – are representative of a new “digital ethic’ that understands file distribution... Read More