IM902 Approaches to the Digital

IM902
Approaches to the Digital

approaches

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

Prof. Sanjay SharmaLink opens in a new window

Assessment

Critical Review (30 CATS only)
Skills Portfolio - Labs (All Students)
Research Essay (All Students)

Indicative Syllabus

Week One - Introduction

Week Two - Platforms

Week Three - Data

Week Four - Affordances

Week Five - Algorithms

Week Six - READING WEEK

Week Seven - Intelligence

Week Eight - Feminisms

Week Nine - Labour

Week Ten - Module Reflections + Assessment Guidance

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.
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.
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.
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.