Assignment 3: Looking up,Looking down!

For this assignment we had to look into our chosen topic from the Tipping point more thoroughly. During the previous assignment we brainstormed about Mavens,connectors and salesmen and talked about services that people use in order to connect. So I've chosen Social Networks for my research, as a lot of people use them to communicate and socialize. During my research I used the Main Library and the DJCAD Library as well as the Internet to find information.
 

Social Networking Sites

Ballantyne.A, Trenwith.L, Zubrinich.S and Corlis.M, ''I feel less lonely'': What older people say about participating in a social networking website, 2010,UK, Pier Professional. (Journal Article)

This article highlights results from a pilot project that implemented an Internet social networking intervention and evaluated the effect it had on older peoples experience of temporal loneliness.

Dulworth.M, The Connect Effect: Building strong, personal,professional and virtual networks, 2007, Berett- Koehler Publishers. (e-Book)
Dulworth argues that networking is an important skill that if people have and improve it, they can become big connectors and this can enrich every aspect of their lives.

Mitchell.W, E-topia: ''Urban life, Jim- but not as we know it'', 2000, Cambridge, The MIT Press (Book)
The global digital network is not just a delivery system for email, Web pages and digital television, it is a whole new way of socializing. In this book Mitchell examines this new infrastructure and its implications for our future daily lives.

Rheingold.H,The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier, 2000, Revised Edition, Cambridge, The MIT Press (Book)

In this book Rheingold tours the ''virtual community'' of online networking. He describes a community where people talk, argue, seek information, organize politically, fall in love and dupe others. He says that people relate to each other online the same as they would do in physical communities.

Robins.K and Webster.F, Times of the Technoculture, 1999, London, Routledge (Book)
The two authors question whether the new information and communications technologies, such as the internet, justify the utopian rhetoric with which they are promoted, suggesting that they often work to reproduce conservative social practices under a new guise.

Shaviro.S, Connected: or what it means to live in the network society, 2003, vol.9, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press (Book)
This book shows how the continual experimentation of science fiction, like science and technology themselves, conjure the invisible social forces that surround us.