/ Spring 24-25 /
Syllabus
Course Outline
Course Description
Our everyday lives, from work to love, art, health, learning, movement, and more are partially or completely mediated through digital technology. This has led many to declare our world and age, a digital one. But when exactly does something become digital? What does it actually mean to be digital? When is media digital, and when is it not? Are we in a new techno-feudalist age or a digitised capitalism? Is AI going to end humanity? We are going to answer these questions and understand where they come from, in this course. We will start by trying to define both digital and media, examining their fusions and reproductions. We will see how totalising narratives of global villages, cyber dystopias, or AI-powered utopias, do not accurately capture the everyday dynamics and operations of digital media. We will see how digital media have been differently developed and interpreted across the globe. We will look at both immaterial and material structures that undergird global digital regimes, from the technologies themselves, to the algorithms, protocols, practices, and infrastructures around them. We will also complicate binaries such as digital/analog, material/immaterial, global/local, authoritarian/democratic, and authentic/commodified along the way. All the while focusing on where the power lies in all this. Whether in tweets or data centres, power and its structures are both created and reproduced within cyberspheres. By the end of our course, you will be able to analyse, critique, and contextualise power in digital media, critically accounting for its different branches and intersections.
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