7. Social Media and Social Change  (Soc 6110)

Introduction to the course:

This course is organized around three questions that help us understand the historical development of digital social systems while also spurring the advance of the two research agendas:

The questions:  

• How have interactive digital systems altered the structure and content of social life in ways that have contributed to social change? 

• How, why and under what conditions do digital social systems contribute to or undermine social order?   

• To what extent do rules of ownership and control of the organizations that provide the digital social systems explain change in their subsidiary rules and behaviors of the users of those systems?   

To answer these questions we will begin by touring fundamental theory and concepts necessary for our understanding of the nature of digital social systems and how those systems can impose conditions that lead to social change.  Then, we will review major developments in the major digital social systems across time, organizing the last thirty years into three overlapping periods: 

The time periods:  

• The early public internet (1995 to about 2012) 

• The middle ages (2010 to about 2018)

• The new digital age (2016 through the present day).  

As William Gibson reminds us, “the future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed”;  and thus, defining aspects of each period emerged unevenly, combining in places at different times, and the peak of each period is characterized by the proliferation of those attributes represented in the rules, practices, system level affordances that shape user behavior and collective outcomes.  For instance, a defining aspect of the middle ages was the shift from the internet, as an open space that people explore, to the dominance of “walled garden” platforms with algorithmic feeds, like Facebook after 2010, and a proliferation of other walled gardens with dedicated apps optimized for smart phone viewing.

The two major research agendas:

• Vibrant Rules: Organization for Evolving Beyond the New Digital Age  is a manuscript describing the evolution of organizational forms, their internal rules, and the rules they impose upon the digital social systems they produce.

  • Eric Gleave and I use insights from the literature on the evolution of cooperation to understand how rules, practices and affordance of digital social systems have changed across time, and in turn have caused evolution in the rules and practices of users of those systems.

  • I will share drafts of chapters from that book while also supplying key readings that inform the arguments from the book.

• The second project investigates a specific set of implications of that work by exploring the ways that widespread attention to engagement maximising social media platforms can disrupt socialization, learning, and educational success. 

  • The first publication in this line is “Anxious and Disengaged: How Social Media's Engagement Model Has Disrupted Student Capacity to Engage in School” with Will Hoffman and Miracle Sammons; forthcoming in the Proceedings of HICSS 2026. 

  • I am actively extending this work by collecting additional data, improving the measurement of key variables, and discovering related themes.  

  • I will share access to the dataset related to this project, and will also share the R code that allows us to collect and organize data from online discussion, and then generate variables based on attributes of each comment in the threaded discussions.  

Overview:

This seminar examines the intersection of social media and social change from an empirical, theoretical, and organizational perspective. We pay special attention to theories of social order that can help explain how different digital systems that provide affordances for social action can result in different collective outcomes in terms of the evolution of rules and behaviors.  

Logistics:

• We meet in person once a week, on Wednesdays at 5:15 to 7:55.  Location, 102 Bentley Annex

• We meet continuously via the work productivity suite called MS Teams for discussions, video calls, sharing resources, etc.  

Assignments:  

Four areas for developing as a researcher are measured in this course:

(100) Seminar deliverables  

(100)  Contribution to Teams discussion

(100) collaborative data collection and analysis project, 

(100) solo or collaborative white paper or research proposal.

Seminar deliverables:

Every week that we have new content  students will generate slides for in class discussion, participate in the discussion and write a two paragraph reflection on what we discussed.   Individual students will typically be responsible to report to the group about insights from specific readings.  All students are expected to contribute to the quality of the seminar discussion through their attention to, and involvement in all readings and materials from the current seminar topics.

These are graded according to the following scale:  

meh  (check minus)     - hopefully very rare

fine (check)       - most common

great (check plus)     - unusual

Social media data collection and analysis project: 

We will perform a collaborative data collection and analysis project using a sample of reddit threads.  Details in class.  

Final paper project:

A collaborative white paper or individual formal research proposal, this assignment includes the production of a 5 min presentation in the form of a video presentation shared with the class in the final week of the semester.

Contacting me:

Send me a direct message on slack, or post to one of our slack channels. 

Howard T. Welser Professor Welser

Office: Bentley Annex 123

Email:  h.t.welser@gmail.com; welser@ohio.edu

Office hours:       

Tuesday   1 ish? 123 Bentley Annex

Wednesday    3:00  to  4:00 123 Bentley Annex

Teams:             Most weekdays 9:30 to 4:00 

General teaching issues

Attention:  Treat class time like your avocation.

Attendance:  Be in class everyday, and be ready to do the work that we have planned for that day.  If you know you will miss a day it is your job to get your work done ahead of time.

Polite electronic communication: Be brief, courteous and considerate. I will be brief, to the point, and to the best of my abilities, prompt. Send a follow up if you don’t hear back within 24 hours (during the school week).

Take credit for your work only:  I should not need to mention this in this course, but I will include it from my 100 level syllabus:  You should, with pride, lay claim to all of your unique contributions. When you work with others on assignments you should take pains to assure that you know, appreciate, and clearly identify the contributions of each of your colleagues. Deliberate attempts to claim the work of others as your own without clear acknowledgement will be seen as plagiarism and will be severely punished: a grade of F will be assigned to the plagiarized assignment.  Do not sign your name to any text generated by someone or something other than your own authorial mind.  See ChatJPP:   Delicious Jalapeno Parrot Poop

Other details

Students with disabilities: I will gladly provide reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities, with the recommendation of Disability Services, at the Office for Institutional Equity (740-593-2620). Please show me the letter from that office indicating accommodations that you may need for this class.