Class Assignment!

Something to get your juices flowing.

For those of you just joining the class, welcome! From now until the election, we are going on a journey to unpack what, exactly, is underlying the dysfunction and polarization in our American social fabric and — importantly! — what we can do about it. These will be entirely new topics than the ones we covered throughout last year, so you can catch up on those at your leisure if you are new; for those who have been following for a while, the coming months should offer some different lenses through which to understand how disinformation works and why. My students have told me that this material created major paradigm shifts for them, so buckle up!

I am still writing the lecture for this new module (Trump hearings hijacked me yesterday), so I thought I’d turn the first part of it into a short and (hopefully) fun assignment. It goes back to a video I saw on Twitter back in 2019, after there was a city-wide blackout in New York City. It was a fascinating sociological illustration of something I had been thinking, writing, and teaching about. I haven’t been able to track down the full video, but you can watch a brief clip here. While searching for it, though, I found that there were videos of other people doing the same thing all over the city, like the one below. So take a look at these videos, and then answer the questions that follow: