The Final Project marks a transition in this class from foundational knowledge about the structure and history of the Internet as a social institution to the application of that knowledge to real contexts and examples. Our content focus will shift from reading essays provided by the professor to reading and viewing web resources based on your own research process. Our assessment focus will also shift, from the mastery of particular facts, theories, and background knowledge to the application of these ideas to the messiness of the real world.

The premise of the Project is that you are an anthropologist studying the effects of the Internet and the Web on social and political movements happening right now or in the recent past. You will conduct basic research on the Internet in the space defined by the intersection of nationalist and political movements and the use of social media. Each of you will be tasked with studying the role that one or more social media platforms play in a particular social movement. After spending a month immersing yourself in the topic, your goal is to come up with an anthropologically informed thesis about the topic in question and then the write a short essay to support it.

Your task is to apply an idea (or set of related ideas) developed in the first part of the course to illuminate facts you gather about the context you’ve been assigned. These ideas include the rhizomic logic of the internet, the long tail as a resource, the effect of databases on communication and interaction, the changing nature of the public sphere, the role of speech genres as indicators of social identity, the role of anonymity in representing political movements, and the effect of social experiences – such as pilgrimages and diaspora – on how community is imagined.

The best way to begin this project is to educate yourself on the topic in question. For example, regarding Egypt and the Arab Spring, what are the specific events in question? When did they start? Who was involved? Begin by using Google to explore the web, news, blogs, and video sites to learn these details. (You may want to use your first post to write these out.) Then follow the ideas and links in the content of your readings to find primary sources – videos of events on the ground, blog posts (in English) of events on the ground, or news stories about them. As you proceed in this fashion, collect links and keep notes about your thoughts, blogging them if you wish. After doing this for a few week, you will have developed some ideas about how to illuminate your data with the ideas covered in the first part of the course.

The Final Project is based also on the premise that we are an Open Source virtual community creating a newspaper about the social media and the public sphere in the world today. As such, the project is both collaborative and individual, synthetic yet parallel. Each of you will be responsible for contributing to a common code base, but you will not be required to work in teams or be graded as a group. However, you are encouraged to form study groups around your topic of research.