SO341-15 Transnational Media Ecologies

How do your #s make the world you live in?

Consider how you use social media. How are you digitally networked? How do certain issues trend? How do you participate in events, issues or trends on social media? Once events or issues trend on social media, they may find their way into print or television, which you access on your personal device. How are social media platforms used by activists to highlight injustice or give momentum to social and political movements? How is ‘user-generated’ content also used for both profit and surveillance?

 

Learn to examine how these networks made of emotions, communications, identity assertions, activisms, and data harvesting & surveillance techniques form a media ecology. Consider how these issues, events or trends criss-cross (trans) national borders. What factors complicate these transnational crossings? How do colonial and postcolonial contexts or gender or race or class or sexuality, complicate these crossings? Learn to think through the ways in which human-technology relations are made and remade through ‘transnational media ecologies.’

 

Bring your digital smarts to this module, and we will work together to understand the world in sociological terms. We will look at ways in which governments, media, activists, corporations and people compete to control or influence the way you click, think, lol, love, hate, vote or want to change the world.

Key Information

Optional Module

15 CATS (undergraduate)

Summative Assessment: Group podcast (50%) and 1500 word media report (50%)

Teaching: 1 x 1 hour lecture and 1 x 1 hour seminar per week.

Module Convenor: Goldie Osuri