Digital Media and Social Change

Catalog description

This course examines how digital media shape culture, power, labor, and social change. Rather than treating the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence as neutral technologies, we will analyze them as social institutions embedded in capitalism and structured by race, class, gender, and global inequality. Drawing on foundational sociological thinkers such as C. Wright Mills, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, students will explore topics including influencers and digital cultural production, the manosphere and tradwife culture, algorithmic discrimination, surveillance capitalism, digital labor, artificial intelligence, and the commodification of attention. The course concludes by considering how people resist these systems and create alternative digital futures through imagination, solidarity, pleasure, and collective action. Throughout the seminar, students will connect sociological theory to contemporary digital life and ask not only how technologies transform society, but also whose interests they serve and how they might be organized differently. Satisfies Sociology major requirement Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought requirement Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement Prerequisites & Notes Pre-reqs: any 100 or 200 level sociology course; SOC 275 Mass Media or SOC 242 Globalization especially encouraged