Course planning: social networks and virtual worlds

I have just found out that rather than teaching ENG 101 in the Fall semester and ENG 102 in the Spring as is my habit, I'll be doing ENG 102 in September (and probably 101 in January). In terms of course content, this means no vampires until April, which kind of sucks given that I was hoping to get on to vampires (after zombies and werewolves) just as the nights were getting long, and students would be walking home in the, ahem, twilight. Other than that, and the fact that the irregular schedule means a lot of repeat students, it's no big deal, but I need to get down to planning ENG 102 pronto.

I could take the easy option and just do my games course again, but I've only just finished doing it and I want to give it a rest. I could take the hard option and design a new course completely from scratch. In fact, that was what I was thinking of doing with my last 102—I had an interesting idea for a course on dance, gesture and ritual, but I never had time to prepare it, and it was just as well given how frustrating it would have been teaching a course like that while literally lame (I had an operation on my knee at the beginning of the semester). But I'm going for the middle way, and reworking an old course I did called "Virtual Worlds". This mixed cyberpunk literature and film (Gibson, Stephenson, The Matrix) with online worlds from lambdaMOO to Second Life (which meant that I was frequently coming out with the paradoxical phrase "real virtual world", by contrast with "fictional virtual world"). This time I'm going to play down the SF side, not least because my students couldn't understand William Gibson at all (though I have to keep the extract from Snowcrash because it's so seminal). Instead, I want to expand the section on social networks (hence the expanded title). Last time I had an article criticising Facebook and tsenft's rebuttal as a kind of introduction to the whole virtuality idea, but it proved so popular that I want to make social networking and the idea of an "online presence" a major part of the course. The basic idea is "from Facebook to the Matrix."

Anyway, if anyone has ideas for good texts on these subjects, please post a comment. I'm looking primarily for what I call "light academic" texts; i.e., articles that follow the conventions of academic writing (clear organisation, citation, little or no slang) but aren't aimed at an expert (or exclusively native-speaker) audience.