I am taking a class in Sociology as a prerequisite to Nursing. This is my first essay for the class. It’s the first essay I’ve had to write in almost a decade, and I found it kind of fun. When I say kind of, it’s because it is still stressful and I turned it in literally 2 minutes before it was due. If anyone actually reads this, please post a response. I’d like to know what you think.
Question: As you probably know, online classes are currently the most popular sections of Sociology 1 that we offer here at CCSF. How do you think that a sociologist would explain why this is?
Online classes are currently the most popular sections of Sociology 1 offered at CCSF. There are many different factors that contribute to this, but I think that from a sociological perspective, the reason has to do with an over-arching trend in the education community toward online learning brought on by the cultural diffusion and acceptance of cyberculture. There are also aspects about sociology that lend itself more to online learning. On a a micro level, I believe that there are things about this particular class and this particular university that would explain the trend towards more students preferring online instruction. Namely, the structure of a lecture class, the internet savvy culture of the Bay Area, and the fact that CCSF has a high number of commuters and people of a low income within it’s student body.
Since the class is online, it is immersed in cyberculture. I’d like to take a few paragraphs to define cyberculture since it is a key point in this essay. Cyberculture is the culture that is emerging from the use of computer networks and is defined as the social conditions brought about by automation and computerization1. It is a society mediated by computer technology: it is experienced mostly through a computer screen.
There are a couple points to be made that come from the mediated experience intrinsic within cyberculture. One is that you cannot see the person you are communicating with, so gestures are re-defined. There have emerged systems that address this issue – online profiles that give identity to a user, the use of emoticons, or the cybercultural norm of using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS to denote that you are shouting. Traditional gestures are largely irrelevant to communication online. This means that one usually has to write clearly and concisely in order to be understood.
The other point to make is that communication is often asynchronous – meaning that you do not normally communicate in ‘real-time,’ instead you write something and it is responded to later. This often causes a person to reflect and think about what they are about to say before they communicate it online. It is worthwhile to mention that this is not always the case. In fact the internet is famous for people engaging in ‘flame-wars.’ This happens when there is a conflict of values between two or more parties and the conversation quickly erupts (or ‘flames’) into in
sults flying back and forth about each other’s character.
An important value of cyberculture is for information and knowledge to be exchanged. Information is coin and currency in this community. Ideas are linked to one another, and this linking is what causes the information to be propagated (and in fact, the act of linking is in itself a form of communicating information as explained by prominent digital ethnographer and professor Dr. Michel Wesch of Kansas State University).
Lastly to our definition, cyberculture is a cognitive and social culture, not a geographic one. People from different parts of the world can take part simultaneously in the same particular area of cyberculture. Since it exists separately from any physical location, a physical identity can exist separately from an internet based identity. This causes cyberculture to often be more fragile than traditional forms of community and culture, where participants can easily take themselves out of or join another part of the culture very quickly.
To combat this fragility inherent in the system, methods have emerged to section different areas of culture through barriers of validation that link your physical identity to your cyber identity. This helps to ensure that the participant has a stake in the culture and will participate in a mutually beneficial way. One example of this would be entering your personal information to join a discussion group or forum.
So where does Sociology 1 from San Francisco City College fit in to this definition of cyberculture? The obvious point to make is that this class takes place online, automatically placing it within this culture. It uses the technology of the web to disseminate information. It disseminates it’s information through a LMS (or Learning Management System2) that presents it’s material asynchronously through what might be recognized as an online forum. The forum is posted to by the teacher and the students, and the students or teacher respond to the posts.
This means the students cannot use gestures and need to think about what they are writing in order to communicate to other students and the teacher. Sociology 1 exists as a distinct and temporal area of culture that is cut off from the rest of cyberspace through the barrier of entry that you have to become a member of San Francisco City College and then sign up and pay for the privilege of participation. A participant in this community has to link their physical identity to their cyber identity through levels of proof that connect them to their physical being – social security number, college id, various passwords etc.
This class’s use of asynchronous information dissemination, the high value placed on information exchange (class participation is in fact part of the grade you receive), the sectioning of the internet into a little slice known as CCSF’s Spring 2009 session of Sociology 1, and the corporal reality of a physical person linked to their online identity are what make this class happen. The cumulative effect of this is that discussions will be if not informative, at least well though out. Which is exactly what you would want in a such a course.
There is also the positivist perspective of Sociology that strives towards unbiased observation. Juxtapose this with the aspect of cyberculture that necessitates the detachment of oneself from their physical being, and you will see that cyberspace is the perfect place to propagate the attitude that one must take as a sociologist to separate oneself from the society that they are part of in order to study it.
Another aspect is that it is just easier to take classes online for a lot of people. Especially the kind of people that go to CCSF – that is, Bay Area residents.
Bay Area people are a special class of people (being one of them I hold them in high regard, so excuse me if my bias shows through in this essay). It is a particularly web savvy culture. Within the area are places like Stanford University, where together with UCLA, the first internet connection was made. Also in the Bay Area is Silicon Valley where a lot of the commercial development of the internet and the web happened (and continue to happen) with companies like Sysco and Google headquartered there. So there is a history of web technology development and a natural familiarity with this new technology that would be hard to find anywhere else. The web and internet are highly regarded and cyberculture is highly celebrated within this community. There are launch parties for web companies – most famously in the 90s with lavish and costly parties that had catered food, an open bar and a variety of entertainers. There is a vibrant hacker counterculture with a long history in the area with many underground events and parties. There are large conventions that center around computers and web technologies that bring people from around the world. It is deep in the cultural history and continues to be closely tied to the local economy. All this combines to make a fertile environment to engage in an online class.
Taking it down to the college level, CCSF culture blends well with an online course. The student body is made up almost exclusively from people who commute to school. You can see this evident in the material culture of CCSF. There are no dorms, but there is a large parking lot across the street, it is close to public transportation, and there are a lot of bicycle racks that commuters can tether their bikes to. Telecommuting to school via online classes can be seen as an extension of the commuter mindset into cyberspace.
Lastly, classes at the community college are the least expensive for a college in the area. This is a manifestation of CCSF’s sanctions expressed in the mission statement of the college to include a diverse community of students. A student can save money by not traveling to and from school, and since a student can log in to the website at any time that is convenient for them, it is much more reasonable for them to have a job to pay for the expense of living in the Bay Area while attending college.
To conclude, the general trend of cyberspace, the location of this class within CCSF, the larger culture of the Bay Area and the surrounding cyberculture all contribute to the trend towards more students taking online instruction for Sociology 1 than on campus. Studying these factors should help to illuminate why this trend is happening.