Who's tweeting at us

Power has been an underdeveloped concept in the rhetoric surrounding the use of social intranets. Expressions like "liberation" and "enhanced collaboration" and "empowerment" are common in marketing, but is this really the case? How does power really work in the social intranet? Who is in control? What are the opportunities of this new model? What are the risks? Using ideas developed by communications scholar Manuel Castells and his work Communication Power, this post introduces how we can understand network power inside of organizations and contemplate its effects.

Within evolutionary biology, signalling theory is a body of theoretical work examining communication between individuals.

Stephen Downes was asked (along with Dave Cormier and George Siemens): "How might it be possible to show that cMOOCs are effective for learning, in the sense of providing evidence that institutions might accept so as to support opening up more courses to outside participants (a la ds106, Alec Couros' EC&I 831, etc.)? Or, more generally, providing evidence that participation in and facilitating cMOOCs is worthy of support by institutions... What I'm looking for are criteria one might use to say that a cMOOC is successful. What should participants be getting out of cMOOCs?"

Nice summary and food for thought from the Theorizing the Web 2013 conference.

Learning communities can emerge spontaneously when people find common learning goals and pursue projects and tasks together in pursuit of those goals. Bounded learning communities (BLCs) are groups that form within a structured teaching or training setting, typically a course. Unlike spontaneous communities, BLCs develop in direct response to guidance provided by an instructor, supported by a cumulative resource base. This article presents strategies that help learning communities develop within bounded frameworks, particularly online environments. Seven distinguishing features of learning communities are presented. When developing supports for BLCs, teachers should consider their developmental arc, from initial acquaintance and trust-building, through project work and skill development, and concluding with wind-down and dissolution of the community. Teachers contribute to BLCs by establishing a sense of teaching presence, including an atmosphere of trust and reciprocal concern. The article concludes with a discussion of assessment issues and the need for continuing research.

Boeder, Pieter. "Habermas' Heritage: The Future of the Public Sphere in the Network Society" First Monday 10(9)(5 September 2005)(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_9/boeder/). - I've always enjoyed a well-constructed attempt to update philosophy and sociology in the context of the current digital era, which is unfolding as we write. In this piece, Boeder offers a lively (if dense) analysis of public discourse and its importance to society in the Web era. Drawing on the work of Habermas, he charts the Internet's growth, the ongoing consolidation of media, and the growing need for an independent sphere of public discourse in the face of these massive forces. He is not a pessimist, though; the public sphere was never a static state, whatever media it relied upon, which have ranged from coffee houses to editorial pages. Habermas argued that as mass media has mutated into monopoly capitalist forms, the role of public debate has shifted from the "dissemination of reliable information to the formation of public opinion." Arguably, this is exactly what MoveOn.Org has been doing, and countless Blogs and Podcasts as well. This article is interesting because it serves as a reminder that the forces that shape society weren't created just yesterday, and that a fresh look at classic philosophy and sociology is not only a good idea, but can actually help us understand the subtle changes the Internet has begun in our public lives. - TH

Situating power/networks... actor/network theory apparently does go back (somewhat) to French poststructuralism (Foucault & Deleuze). Need to dig into the criticisms.

Power in the network society is exercised through networks. There are four different forms of power under these social and technological conditions: 1. Networking Power: the power of the actors and organizations included in the networks that constitute the core of the global network society over human collectives and individuals who are not included in these global networks. 2. Network Power: the power resulting from the standards required to coordinate social interaction in the networks. In this case, power is exercised not by exclusion from the networks but by the imposition of the rules of inclusion. 3. Networked Power: the power of social actors over other social actors in the network. The forms and processes of networked power are specific to each network. 4. Network-making Power: the power to program specific networks according to the interests and values of the programmers, and the power to switch different networks following the strategic alliances between the dominant actors of various networks. Counterpower is exercised in the network society by fighting to change the programs of specific networks and by the effort to disrupt the switches that reflect dominant interests and replace them with alternative switches between networks. Actors are humans, but humans are organized in networks. Human networks act on networks via the programming and switching of organizational networks. In the network society, power and counterpower aim fundamentally at influencing the neural networks in the human mind by using mass communication networks and mass self-communication networks.

This article presents a set of grounded hypotheses on the interplay between communication and power relationships in the technological context that characterizes the network society. Based on a selected body of communication literature, and of a number of case studies and examples, it argues that the media have become the social space where power is decided. It shows the direct link between politics, media politics, the politics of scandal, and the crisis of political legitimacy in a global perspective. It also puts forward the notion that the development of interactive, horizontal networks of communication has induced the rise of a new form of communication, mass self-communication, over the Internet and wireless communication networks. Under these conditions, insurgent politics and social movements are able to intervene more decisively in the new communication space. However, corporate media and mainstream politics have also invested in this new communication space. As a result of these processes, mass media and horizontal communication networks are converging. The net outcome of this evolution is a historical shift of the public sphere from the institutional realm to the new communication space.

Good contextual stuff (crosscultural too) about our network society from Manuel Castells (2005).