FINAL

Many of you will be presenting original work connected to the themes of our course on the last day as your final project. Please remember that together with this presentation you should hand in a short description of the project and its connection to a text or texts from our class that I can use as a reference in assessing your work.

Those of you who would rather not do such a presentation are welcome to produce a short (5pp.) final essay responding to the following prompt:

What is the shape and what might be the significance of a transformation from a mass mediated public sphere into more p2p networked public sphere? Choose any two texts from the course to describe how, in your own view, the emerging peer-to-peer networked public sphere differs most significantly from the mass mediated public sphere that preceded it.

I have no expectation at all about how sweeping, how deep, how hopeful, how fragile, how illusory you have come to believe this transformation truly is, nor do I have any expectation about what each of you will finally decide the significance of this transformation truly amounts to.

Berube

Well, I've looked all over the place, but to no avail. When Berube migrated his site some of the essays available on the old site vanished down the memory hole and the beautiful essay I assigned for Thursday is among them. I cannot find it anywhere else. Unless somebody has had luck finding it through some other route I suppose we'll have to confine our discussion to the remaining three pieces Thurs. The essay became the basis for a wonderful book by the same title that I recommend to your attention. Hope your holiday went well and that everybody is working on their keywords assignment. Word about the final forthcoming in my next post.