Digital Culture

Catalog description

As you read this course description there are approximately three billion people across the globe engaging in a range of practices, activities, and encounters in online fora. In this graduate level seminar, we will read selected ethnographic and theoretical texts and reflect on our own quotidian ‘digital’ practices, to critically engage with the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) across a range of geographic and social locations. A key part of the work in our time together will be to contextualize platform based communicative and creative practices and the worlds they create by carefully scrutinizing the materialities, infrastructures, and labor arrangements that undergird and maintain them, as well as think through how these technologies are being utilized in ongoing projects of governance and extraction. Our other equally important goal will be to grapple with how ethnography – a method of knowing premised on ‘being there’ – has been recalibrated and reimagined to research digital culture(s), a term used to broadly describe the various self and worldmaking practices and encounters that ICTs enable and engender.