HU Credits: 2

Degree/Cycle: 2nd degree (Master)

Responsible Department: Communication and Journalism

Semester: 2nd Semester

Teaching Languages: Hebrew

Campus: Mt. Scopus

Course/Module Coordinator: Nicholas John

Coordinator Email: n.john@huji.ac.il

Coordinator Office Hours: Monday, 10-11, or by appointment

Teaching Staff:
Dr. Nicholas John

Course/Module description:
‘Sharing’ is a central keyword for the digital age. Not only is sharing the form of our participation in Web 2.0, but the Internet itself is seen as responsible for the flourishing of social and economic practices known as the ‘sharing economy’, which the course will explore. Sharing is also a form of speech whereby we tell others about our feelings, but this too is increasingly mediated by communications technologies. ‘Sharing’, therefore, is a powerful metaphor that brings together our social, economic and emotional lives, and that offers a fascinating prism through which to examine the way in which these different spheres are converging through technology.

Course/Module aims:
The course aims to shed new light on the digital age by closely examining the concept of sharing.

Learning outcomes - On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
* Distinguish sharing from other similar analytical concepts
* Explain the way that sharing operates as a metaphor across a number of social spheres
* Appraise the claims of the proponents of the sharing economy
* Critique the use of the term sharing where appropriate

Attendance requirements(%):
100

Teaching arrangement and method of instruction: Frontal lectures with class discussion and student presentations of articles. For those writing seminar papers, a presentation of their topic, research question and initial literature review.

Course/Module Content:
The course will discuss the following topics:
What is sharing?
Sharing as a type of speech
Sharing and Web 2.0
Sharing economies - production
Sharing economies - consumption

Required Reading:
Selected items from the reading list below.

Additional Reading Material:
Initial reading list. More to follow.

Sharing on Web 2.0
Arceneaux, Noah, and Amy Schmitz Weiss. 2010. Seems Stupid Until You Try It: Press Coverage of Twitter, 2006–9. New Media & Society 12 (8): 1262-1279.
boyd, dana, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan. 2008. "Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on twitter." In 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Koloa, Kauai, Hawaii: IEEE Computer Society. 1-10.
Cardon, Dominique, and Christophe Aguiton. 2007. The strength of weak cooperation: an attempt to understand the meaning of Web 2.0. Communications and Strategies 65: 51-65.
Java, Akshay, Xiodan Song, Tim Finin, and Belle Tseng. 2007. "Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities." In 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis: ACM. 56-65.
John, Nicholas. 2012. Sharing and Web 2.0: The emergence of a keyword. New Media & Society.
Miller, Vincent. 2008. New media, networking and phatic culture. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14 (4): 387-400.
Wittel A (2011) Qualities of Sharing and their Transformations in the Digital Age. International Review of Information Ethics 15: 3-8.

Sharing in anthropology/hunter-gatherer societies
Bird-David, Nurit. 2005. "The property of sharing: Western analytical notions, Nayaka contexts." In Property and equality, eds. Thomas Widlok and Wolde Gossa Tadesse. New York: Berghahn Books. 201-216.
Bird-David, Nurit, and Asaf Darr. 2009. Commodity, gift and mass-gift: on gift-commodity hybrids in advanced mass consumption cultures. Economy and Society 38 (2): 304-325.
Katriel, Tamar. 1987. “Bexibùdim!”: Ritualized sharing among Israeli children. Language in Society 16 (03): 305-320.
Mauss, Marcel. 1954 [1925]. The gift; forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. Glencoe, Ill.,: Free press.

Sharing as form of consumption
Belk, Russell. 2010. Sharing. Journal of Consumer Research 36 (5): 715-734.
Belk, Russell. 2007. Why Not Share Rather Than Own? The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 611(1), 126-140
Benkler, Yochai. 2004. Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production. Yale Law Journal 114 (2): 273-359.
Benkler, Yochai. 200?. The Wealth of Networks (chapter 4?).
Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. 2010. What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. HarperBusiness.
Gaskins K (2010) The New Sharing Economy. Latitude. http://latdsurvey.net/pdf/Sharing.pdf
Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. 2006. Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. New York, NY: Portfolio Trade.
Terranova T (2000) Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text 18(2): 33-58.
Van Dijck, Jose, and David Nieborg. 2009. Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos. New Media & Society 11 (5): 855-874.

Therapeutic narrative and sharing as a type of speech
Cameron, Deborah. 2000. Good to Talk? Living and Working in a Communication Culture. London: Sage (Chapter 6).
Carbaugh, Donal. 1988. Talking American: Cultural Discourses on Donahue. Ablex Publishing (Chapter 8).
Harber, Kent D., and Dov J. Cohen. 2005. The Emotional Broadcaster Theory of Social Sharing. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 24 (4): 382-400.
Illouz, Eva. 2008. Saving the modern soul: therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Katriel, T., & Philipsen, G. (1981). "What we need is communication": "Communication" as a cultural category in some American speech. Communication Monographs, 48(4), 301-317.

אילוז אווה. 2012. גאולת הנפש המודרנית. הקיבוץ המאוחד.
פיאלקוף, יונתן. 2012. תזה לשם קבלת תואר MA. האוניברסיטה העברית.

Course/Module evaluation:
End of year written/oral examination 0 %
Presentation 15 %
Participation in Tutorials 0 %
Project work 85 %
Assignments 0 %
Reports 0 %
Research project 0 %
Quizzes 0 %
Other 0 %

Additional information:
None