IM902
Approaches to the Digital

20/30 CATS - (10/15 ECTS)

30 CAT - CORE FOR MA IN DIGITAL MEDIA AND CULTURE

Term 1

Computer networks, devices, and infrastructures structure and facilitate much of our social, political and cultural life.

This module introduces students to a range of approaches to digital media and culture. Each week, we will take up a different interdisciplinary orientation (i.e. platforms, algorithms, subjects, ecologies), and explore how these can contribute to a critical understanding of the digital. Each approach contains a number of key concepts (i.e. formats, datafication, digital precarity, the deep vernacular web); concepts are related to problems or issues for the study of digital culture. Approaches, concepts and their problems are then explored critically and creatively through independent research.

Today, many key institutions (media, policing, health care, education, government, museums) rely on computational infrastructures for their basic operations. Whether used for tracking, predicting, visualising, mapping, sensing, creating, informing or socialising, these technologies and methods are transforming the fabric of everyday life, and shaping our visions of the future.

Students on this module will learn to think critically, reflexively and creatively about the digital by exploring transformations in politics, sociality, economics, aesthetics, knowledge, subjectivity and experience.

Module Convenor

Dr Michael Dieter

Assessment

• App Review (30 CATS only)
• App Store Analysis (All Students)
• Research Essay (All Students)

Indicative Syllabus

Week One - Diagrams

Week Two - Platforms

Week Three - Affordances

Week Four - Data

Week Five - Algorithms

Week Six - READING WEEK

Week Seven - Memes

Week Eight - Subjects

Week Nine - Labour

Week Ten - Intelligence

Illustrative Bibliography

• Amoore, Louise. Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
• Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2015.
• Bucher, Tania. If...Then Algorithmic Power and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Cheney-Lippold, John. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: New York University Press, 2017.
• Crawford, Kate and Vladan Joler. ‘Anatomy of an AI System’ (2018), https://anatomyof.ai/
• D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren Klein. Data Feminism: From Data Ethics to Data Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.
• Davis, Jenny L. and James B. Chouinard. ‘Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse’, Bulletin of Science 36.4 (2017): 241-248.
• de Zeeuw, Daniël and Marc Tuters. ‘Teh Internet is Serious Business: On the Deep Vernacular Web and its Discontents,’ Cultural Politics 16.2 (2020): 214-32.
• Doorn, Niels van. ‘Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low-Income Service Work in the “on-Demand” Economy’. Information, Communication & Society 20.6 (2017): 898–914.
• Duffy, Brooke Erin. (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2017.
• Hogan, Mél. 'Big Data Ecologies', ephemera: theory & politics in organisation 18.3 (2018): 631-57.
• Lindtner, Silvia. Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
• Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, New York: New York University Press, 2018.
• Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
• Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
• Poell, Thomas, David Nieborg, and José van Dijck. ‘Platformisation,’ Internet Policy Review 8.4 (2019): https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1425
• Sack, Warren. The Software Arts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.
• Starosielski, Nicole. 'The Elements of Media Studies.' Media+Environment 1.1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780.
• Steinberg, Marc. The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
• Volmer, Axel. ‘Reformatting Media Studies: Toward a Theoretical Framework for Format Studies’, in Marek Jancovic, Axel Volmar and Alexandra Schneider (eds) Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures, Leuphana: Meson Press, 2020, pp. 27-45.
• Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, ‎ Profile Books, 2019.

Learning Outcomes

The module aims to encourage students to:

• Gain a theoretical and practical understanding of systematic challenges brought in relation to digital infrastructures across disciplines;
• Acquire an advanced and interdisciplinary grounded conceptual vocabulary and a creative methodological approach towards the multiform phenomena of the digital era and their interpretations;
• Innovatively and independently evaluate digital phenomena and apply conceptual and methodological frameworks that yield original and sound interpretative analyses;
• Develop and demonstrate independent interpretative analysis through experimental practice, discussion, and forms of academic writing.