Technology, Culture and Power

Catalog description

(formerly NMD 3090; History of Digital Media) Writing Intensive Course This course is a focused survey of various academic conversations that inform the study and theory of culture and media technology, with a particular focus on US culture. Throughout this course students will consider culture not simply as something created by people nor as a set of objects that house representations of the world. Rather, students will approach culture as a space in which meaning and the possibilities for understanding reality, technology, and the world are (re)produced. Students will interrogate how culture, through technological forms and media formats, implicates our sense of the world, shapes communicative practices, identities, and performances of everyday life. In particular, students will engage three intersecting topics- technology, politics, and identity- that help illuminate how politics and culture work together, or, how technology enables and informs culture as a site of political struggles.