Media and Technology
4:05- 7:05 Wednesdays, Sociology Seminar Room, 31 So. Prospect St.
One cannot understand contemporary global politics, economics, or social relations without taking into account the changing world of media technologies. Smart phones, social media, hacking and more have become intertwined with human life in ways unconceivable just a few years ago. This course provides an in-depth look at recent scholarly literature on the topic.
As a senior seminar, this course is intended to teach students something about serious scholarship, and about how to think intelligently about communication technology: what the scholarship is, what questions it asks, how it tries to answer them, how to make sense of it in general. Media technology are controversial and complex; there are no certain or easy answers about them. So this course does more to teach you how to think intelligently about the media than it provides you with one or another viewpoint on it.
The following textbooks have been ordered through the UVM bookstore:
- J. Macgregor Wise and Jennifer Daryl Slack, Culture and Technology: A Primer 2nd Edition, Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers; 2 edition (December 17, 2014) ISBN-13: 978-1433107757
- dana boyd, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, Yale University Press (February 24, 2015) Paperback - ISBN-13: 978-0300199000
- Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Yale University Press Hardcover – May 16, 2017 ISBN-13: 978-0300215120
- Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press) Paperback – September 2, 2016 ISBN-13: 978-0262529877
Assignments: class participation is required and counts for 15% of your grade. You will also turn in reading journals (10%) weekly, lead class discussions (15%), and write a research paper with multiple components (60%). There are likely to be other short assignments during the semester as well. I am usually happy to be flexible with deadlines if you notify me one week in advance; if you notify me later than that, I won't be. All assignments must be completed to pass the course.
