After reading many articles on sociable media and listening to conference presentations, I wanted to focus on the connection between the technology, students and the social psychological aspects of student development. It seems that Facebook exists between the confines of the technology and the participatory culture that’s developed around the superstructure of Facebook. Jenkins would …
My interest in researching online social networks, especially Facebook, comes from my interest in other writers such as Howard Rheingold, Pierre Levy, and Henry Jenkins and their work looking at symbolic interactionism within social networks. Rheingold’s methods always looked at the vortex between technology, culture and critical analysis. The “technologies of cooperation” described by Rheingold …
The purpose of my dissertation will be to observe incoming “traditional freshmen” (e.g. 18- to-20 year old students coming to college for the first time) at three Midwestern universities whose hometowns are small towns, where the population is less than 5,000 residents, and see how those freshmen use Facebook as a coping mechanism. Facebook is …