/ Spring 23-24 /
Course Description
Our daily communications, jobs, intimate relations, purchases, health, education, and transport have come to be partially or completely mediated through digital technology. The technologies, protocols, practices, and infrastructures that undergird this global regime of life are often subsumed under totalising narratives of global villages and cyber-dystopias. In this course, we are going to take a holistic view of how digital media operates, focusing on its contemporary logics, and entangled histories. We will examine digital media’s origins and explore its various life-cycles up until this moment. We will see how digital media were differently interpreted and implemented across the world. And we will shine the light on the backends and infrastructures that uphold and shape our digital media uses.
Through our class discussions and unit projects, students will synthesise and argue through a wide body of literature on digital media. As blockchains, artificial intelligences, and ChatGPTs continue to roar through our lives, this course will historicise and contextualise these developments, allowing for critical accounting of digital media, old and new.