Journal Articles

Access to full-text SAGE journal articles that have been carefully selected to support and expand on the concepts presented in each chapter. Journal articles can act as an ideal resource to help support your assignments and studies.


Article 1: Schoon, Eric and Cindy L. Cain. 2011. “Facebook’s Boundaries.” Contexts. 10(2): 70-71.

Abstract: Facebook was established to help students keep in touch after graduation, but now it’s being credited with major roles in everything from domestic elections to international uprisings. In its no-longer-insular world, Facebook transforms the private into the public.

  1. How do Facebook and other social networking sites play a role in shifting the boundaries between public and private in our lives? Can you identify examples of this in your own life?
  2. What sorts of larger events do the authors consider in terms of social networking? How might these events have been different without SNS?
  3. What sort of argument are they making about technology’s role? Is it deterministic? Why or why not?


Article 2: Whannel, Gary. 2009. “Television and the Transformation of Sport.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 625(1): 205-218.

Abstract: Sport played a significant part in the growth of television, especially during its emergence as a dominant global medium between 1960 and 1980. In turn, television, together with commercial sponsorship, transformed sport, bringing it significant new income and prompting changes in rules, presentation, and cultural form. Increasingly, from the 1970s, it was not the regular weekly sport that commanded the largest audiences but, rather, the occasional major events, such as the Olympic Games and football’s World Cup. In the past two decades, deregulation and digitalization have expanded the number of channels, but this fragmentation, combined with the growth of the Internet, has meant that the era in which shared domestic leisure was dominated by viewing of the major channels is closing. Yet, sport provides an exception, an instance when around the world millions share a live and unpredictable viewing experience.

  1. How does the author make the argument that the technology of television transformed sport and sport itself shaped the growth of television? How does this reflect theories you read about in Chapter 9?
  2. What was the relationship between sports and the media like before television? What are some of the specific ways it changed with the advent of television?
  3. The author says that “the experience of spectatorship has been transformed”- why? Do you agree? What are the positives and the negatives, both for the sports and their audiences?


Article 3: Anthony, Denise, Sean W. Smith, and Timothy Williamson. 2009. “Reputation and Reliability in Collective Goods: The Case of the Online Encyclopedia Wikipedia.” Rationality and Society. 21(3): 283-306.

Abstract: An important organizational innovation enabled by the revolution in information technologies is ‘open source’ production which converts private commodities into essentially public goods. Similar to other public goods, incentives for reputation and group identity appear to motivate contributions to open source projects, overcoming the social dilemma inherent in producing such goods. In this paper we examine how contributor motivations affect the type of contributions made to the open source online encyclopedia Wikipedia. As expected, we find that registered participants, motivated by reputation and commitment to the Wikipedia community, make many contributions with high reliability. Surprisingly, however, we find the highest reliability from the vast numbers of anonymous ‘Good Samaritans’ who contribute only once. Our findings of high reliability in the contributions of both Good Samaritans and committed ‘zealots’ suggest that open source production succeeds by altering the scope of production such that a critical mass of contributors can participate.

  1. What do the authors mean by “open source production?” How is Wikipedia an example of this?
  2. What different sorts of contributors are there in a community such as Wikipedia and what motivates them? How reliable are the contributions made by different types of users, according to the authors?
  3. What are the social contexts in which technology is used to create Wikipedia? What are the social mechanisms at work?
  4. Overall, does “the wisdom of crowds” seem reliable to you? Do you trust the information you find on Wikipedia? Why or why not? How does this article change how you view such a site?


Article 4: Good, Katie Day. 2013. “From scrapbook to Facebook: A history of personal media assemblage and archives.” New Media & Society 15(4): 557- 573.

Abstract: This study surveys recent research on print-era scrapbooks and contemporary social media to highlight commonalities between the two formats, both in terms of the practices they have historically promoted for users, and the methodological challenges they produce for researchers. It argues that scrapbooks and social media can be conceptualized as sites of personal media assemblage and personal media archives, a designation that highlights the simultaneously social and archival dimensions of each form. After discussing these formal similarities, the author identifies three shared functions: (1) documenting friendship, (2) navigating new media abundance, and (3) communicating taste and building cultural capital. By drawing functional and formal parallels between the two media, the goal is to observe how these ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies might mutually shed light on each other’s neglected social and archival dimensions, offering scholars a wider range of angles from which to approach them as cultural and biographical texts.

  1. How does the author argue that Facebook is similar to scrap-booking in an earlier media era? What are the characteristics the new medium shares with the “old” print era?
  2. How is a Facebook page different from a print-based personal scrapbook?
  3. Why does the author think it’s important about to think about “today’s social media practices as entrenched in a long history of habits and hobbies”?
  4. What does the author mean by “personal media assemblages”? Can you apply this concept to your own use of social media, whether it’s Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc.?