Hiya everybody! I’m Austin Alleman, your classmate in ENGL 138: Internet Culture in the Information Society and a native of the best city in the world. I’m a fourth and final year student here at Santa Clara, with majors in Mathematics and Computer Science. Outside of classes, I perform research in mathematical criminology and sometimes draw. Someday I hope to be able to brew beer in a competent fashion, and to attend a doctoral program in computational or applied mathematics. Welcome to my ENGL 138: Internet Culture in the Information Society portal — here you can visit each of the project sites I’ve created at the links in the menu to the right, or in the descriptive paragraphs below.
Our first project of the quarter concerned the development of an ethnography of a digital culture, so as to understand the nature of Internet communities. To this end, I chose to conduct my ethnography on the college discussion forum College Confidential; my investigation concerned the apparent ‘stickiness’ of the website, despite graduation from high school or college, it was apparent to me (as a long-time user) that students remained to give advice, or opinions on the student quality-of-life at their own schools, or…whatever? I intended to shed some light on the motivations for university students to remain on a website founded primarily for high school seniors. My answer is scattered one — some students remain for their own benefit whilst some remain for the benefit of others. The central purpose of the study was an investigation of individual use of the Internet in a communal nature, that is, how do communities of interested persons utilize the Internet as a medium for convention?
The second project maintains the import of community, though it seeks to apply understanding of Internet culture as a vector of persuasion — 
“tactical” media. In this project, I focused on the issue of grade inflation at American universities. Increasingly, students in the U.S. who receive bachelor’s degrees expect high grade point averages, and exceedingly often do professors award them — I aim to convince both constituencies that this reality is unsustainable, and indeed dangerous for the American society.
The third and final project analyzes literature as it relates to modern society. In conjunction with students from my English 138 class (including Jennifer Warren, Emma Barrie, Nidal Nasrah, and Jasmine Farias), I produced a hypertext analyzing actionable surveillance in the novel “Little Brother” by author and techno-activist Cody Doctorow, the primary focus being the philosophical ideals of determinism and free will. When does a powerful entity, engaged in the act of surveillance, dictate the act of an individual constituent of that entity as dangerous? Is public surveillance an actionable cause? What about private surveillance? We explore these subdivisions of surveillance as actionable (or non-actionable!) causes in the hypertext, and the nature of Doctorow’s fiction concerning the subject.