Interrogating Information: Research and Writing for a Digital Public

Catalog description

Current scientific and technological innovations inspire a need to weigh and evaluate information like never before, while navigating the digital world has become a critically important practice. In other words, we must interrogate information instead of passively receiving it as we encounter news, research, and everyday communications. Where scholarly conversations found in books and journal articles form the backbone of academic discourse, these are not the only sources of knowledge worth sharing and not the only forums where valuable conversations take place. These other sources of information and venues for sharing knowledge include digital conversations and knowledge distribution on platforms that include TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia, among others. The fundamental question this course seeks to answer is: How do we leverage a multitude of information sources to become more thoughtful and more literate when interacting with the knowledge produced within the digital world? Throughout this course, we will examine different online communities that generate information, from TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube to other outlets such as Wikipedia and the search engines that lead us there. These communities will revolve around an intersectional combination of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Our goal is to explore where and how online knowledge is formed, who forms that knowledge through community engagement, and how it is dispersed to better understand the information networks we rely upon and to put them in social and cultural contexts. Broader questions we will consider and discuss include issues of equity and access to information, how does information lead to knowledge, who dominates information distributed within online conversations, and how do other voices carve out spaces for themselves via diverse communities. Assignments will model the research and writing process and will build towards a substantive research paper alongside a multimedia presentation in the style of a TikTok video or a specialized website focused on a given online community in order to best serve as a communications-oriented course. Counts as a Communication Intensive course. Counts as a Human Diversity & Commonality course.