The curricular unit of Cyberculture has as its central objective to put the students in contact with the new digital scene and to promote a critical understanding of the multifaceted Internet in everyday life. At the end of the semester, students should be able to i). articulate critical reasoning about the interrelationships between cyberspace, cyberculture and communities; ii). recognize the mutations that result from the intersection of content, audiences and technologies; iii). to dominate scientific research tools in digital context, namely of analysis of social networks and netnography.

1. Internet and Digital Culture
a). Concepts: cyberspace, cybercultures, inter-interactivity, interconnection, collective intelligence, interactivity, immersion, digital culture
b). Sociology of Cyberspace: models of network communication, network society and information society, mobile society
c). Communities and identities online
d). Network culture and social impacts
e). Digital literacy, digital divide and fake news
f). New forms of public life: citizenship, political participation, protest
g). Social Networking
h). Audiences in network culture
2. Social Media
a). History and evolution of social media
b). The new paradigm of communication
c). Platforms and social networks
d). Mobile social media
e). Content for social networks
f). Interaction with users
g). Different content formats
h). Online reputation monitoring and management
i). Strategic plan in social media
3. Digital Methods
a). Introduction to netnography
b). Computer-mediated fieldwork
c). Concepts and methods of Social Network Analysis in the study of network structures
in social media.
d). Applications of Social Network Analysis in the collection of data, types of networks, analysis metrics and visualization of networks in social media.
e). Case studies: Facebook, Twitter, hashtag networks, threaded networks

Amaral, Inês (2016). Redes Sociais na Internet: Sociabilidades Emergentes. Covilhã: LabComIFP.
Cardoso, Gustavo (2009). Da comunicação de massa à comunicação em rede. Porto: Porto Editora.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Kozinets, Robert (2010). Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.