Examine one particular individual or organization (political, commercial, or otherwise) of your own choosing who has famously mastered one of these “new forms of document” to gain power, popularity, and/or influence.

The Social Life of Documents

Your final essay will be a carefully constructed consideration and extension of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s “The Social Life of Documents”.

In particular, your final essay will be a consideration and extension of Brown and Duguid’s assertion that “[s]eeing documents as the means to make and maintain social groups, not just the means to deliver information, makes it easier to understand the utility and success of new forms of document.”

You need to read “The Social Life of Documents” in its entirety (and perhaps several times) BEFORE you begin work on your essay.

Your essay will examine ONE particular individual or organization (political, commercial, or otherwise) of your own choosing who has famously mastered one of these “new forms of document” to gain power, popularity, and/or influence.

You will examine how this particular individual or organization accessed, elevated, and exploited the “social life” of his/her/its document to develop a “robust social world” and inspire action or devotion or support.

You can focus on a politician, a performer, an organization, an influencer, a celebrity, or whatever, but you need to be sure the representative example you select can provide you with ample primary evidence to support an essay that challenges, contrasts or in any other way continues the dialogue begun by Brown and Duguid.

So, you need evidence of a document having a social life, and you need evidence of your example manipulating or exploiting this social life to gain power and influence.