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COMMUNITIES OF INNOVATION:
CYBORGANIC AND THE BIRTH OF NETWORKED SOCIAL MEDIA
by
Jennifer Catharine Cool
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ANTHROPOLOGY)
December 2008
Copyright 2008 Jennifer C. Cool
Object Description
| Title | Communities of innovation: Cyborganic and the birth of networked social media |
| Author | Cool, Jennifer Catharine |
| Author email | jenny@cool.org; cool@usc.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Anthropology |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2008-05-13 |
| Date submitted | 2008 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2008-12-04 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Lutkehaus, Nancy |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Cooper, Eugene Castells, Manuel |
| Abstract | Cyborganic, the subject of this study, was a community whose members brought Wired magazine online; launched Hotwired, the first ad-supported online magazine; set-up Web production for CNET; led the open source Apache project; and staffed and started dozens of other Internet firms and projects -- from Craig's List to Organic Online -- during the first phase of the Web's development as a popular platform (1993-1999). As a conscious project to build a hybrid community both online and on-ground, Cyborganic's central premise was that mediated and face-to-face interaction are mutually sustaining and can be used together to build uniquely robust communities. Cyborganic was also an Internet start-up and the business project provided both impetus and infrastructure for the community. The social forms and cultural practices developed in this milieu figured in the initial development of Web publishing, and prefigured Web 2.0 in online collaboration, collective knowledge creation, and social networking.; The objectives of this dissertation are several. The first is to demonstrate the role of Cyborganic in the innovation and adoption of networked social media through an ethnographic case study of the group, showing it as exemplary of the regional and cultural advantage of "technopoles" and as precursor to contemporary phenomena of online social networking. The second objective is to interrogate the relation between entrepreneurial and utopian practices and social imaginaries in the Cyborganic project, identifying not only their synergies, but also their tensions. Finally, my third objective is to ground celebratory and utopian discourses of new media genealogically, showing that the social media heralded today as "revolutionary" grew from earlier practices of personal computing, multimedia, and telecommunity similarly hailed as revolutionary in their day. Rather than representing rupture with the past, the narrative of social revolution through technologies is a cultural legacy that has passed through generations, and one that draws on quintessentially American attitudes and practice. |
| Keyword | web history; internet history; internet culture; community; telecommunity; online community; cultural commune; San Francisco; Bay Area region; business history; innovation; technopole; entrepreneurialism; utopianism; social networks; social media; popular culture; mass communications |
| Coverage date | 1993/1999 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m1871 |
| Rights | Cool, Jennifer Catharine |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Cool-2404 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume40/etd-Cool-2404.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | COMMUNITIES OF INNOVATION: CYBORGANIC AND THE BIRTH OF NETWORKED SOCIAL MEDIA by Jennifer Catharine Cool A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ANTHROPOLOGY) December 2008 Copyright 2008 Jennifer C. Cool |
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