Launching the networked society 2012

I am pleased to launch the blog for "The networked society", an honors class offered at Northeastern University.  This class is devoted to understanding the role that networks-- the set of relationships among people, institutions, objects of various types-- play in our world.  In this Facebook age, our class will focus, in part, on the impact of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) in shaping those networks.  One motif of this course is that modern ICTs blur the traditional social boundaries that we construct for ourselves.  A class is one of those boundaries-- where a class is made up of a small number of people engaged in a discussion in a physically bounded space, the classroom.  That boundary has always been somewhat permeable-- a good class, one hopes, inspires discussions outside of the classroom.  The objective of this blog is to seize, in some small way, the opportunities that social media might play in placing the discussion of the course in the broader discourse regarding our networked world.  Students will be placing short commentaries inspired by the course readings in this space.  If you have stumbled across this blog, welcome!  and please feel free to contribute to the conversation.