Participation or Exploitation?: A Reading Group on Critical Perspectives on Social Media

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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Join us for a five-session reading group on the politics and culture of social media, presented in conjunction with the Wages For Facebook campaign. For more information, or to sign up for all or some of the sessions, please email nicole.cohen@utoronto.ca at least 2 days prior to the session.

All sessions run from 2pm to 3:30pm on select Fridays at the Blackwood Gallery, Kaneff Centre.

Free and open to the public, and all staff, faculty, and students welcome!

Co-presented with Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology ICCIT

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Session #1

Introduction: Social media, audiences, and agency

Friday, September 26, 2 – 3:30pm

Facilitated by Prof. Nicole Cohen

Readings:

Mark Andrejevic. 2011. Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy. Surveillance & Society 83: 278-287.

Jos van Dijk. 2009. Users Like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content. Media, Culture & Society 311: 41-58. Library DOI: 10.1177/0163443708098245

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Session #2

Is it work? Social media and the great labour debate

Friday, October 10, 2 – 3:30pm

Facilitated by Prof. Nicole Cohen

Readings:

Tiziana Terranova. 2000. Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. Social Text 182: 33-58.

Nicole Cohen. 2008. The Valorization of Surveillance: Toward a Political Economy of Facebook.” Democratic Communiqu 221: 522.

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Session #3

Gender and social media

Friday, October 24, 2 – 3:30pm

Facilitated by Prof. Leslie Shade and Prof. Victoria Tahmasebi

Readings:

Leslie Regan Shade. 2014. Give Us Bread, But Give Us Roses: Gender and Labour in the Digital Economy. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 102: 129-144.

Melissa Gira Grant. 2013. Girl Geeks and Boy Kings. Dissent 601: 4649.

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Session #4

The economics of selling personal information

Friday, November 7, 2 – 3:30pm

Facilitated by Prof. Brett Caraway

Readings:

Stephen Lilley, Frances S. Grodzinsky, and Andra Gumbus. 2012. Revealing the Commercialized and Compliant Facebook User. Journal of Information, Communication & Ethics in Society 102: 82-92.

V. Kumar and Bala Sundaram. 2012. Lessons Learned from GMs Pullback from Facebook Ads. Forbes.com, June 18.

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Session #5

Alternatives and resistance?: Rethinking social media

Friday, November 21, 2 – 3:30pm

Facilitated by Prof. Brett Caraway

Readings:

Ariel Bleicher. 2011. The Anti-Facebook. IEEE Spectrum,June 2011: 54-83.

Manuel Castells. Prelude to Revolution: Where it All Started. 2012. In Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Wages For Facebook

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Co-presented with the Institute for Communications, Culture, Information and Technology. Generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

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