32113

WiSe 19/20: Critical Approaches to Digital Culture(s)

Sören Schoppmeier

Comments

The aim of this course is to explore dominant as well as emerging digital technologies and the cultures that accompany them from a critical perspective. Engaging the work of leading scholars from a variety of fields, including Media Studies, African American Studies, and Law, we will turn a critical eye toward the algorithmic technologies that are increasingly coterminous with American life in the twenty-first century. Looking at phenomena ranging from search engines and videogames to social media and predictive algorithms, we will ponder questions such as the following: How can algorithms be racist? Are social media really anti-social? Should we worry about the Googlization of everything? How do videogames promote a politics of whiteness? Studying these and other formations of digital culture as well as some of their representations in popular culture (e. g., film, TV, literature) will help us problematize the broader impact of new technologies and media that present themselves as neutral or even beneficial even as they are deeply entangled with longstanding ideological formations and political and economic interests. We will thus look for the continuities rather than disruptions presented by digital culture, paying special attention to power differentials along the lines of race, class, gender, and others. Please register via Campus Management and Blackboard. Registration will open during the first half of October. Participants are expected to acquire a copy of Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle (2013) and to have read it by the time it is discussed in class (later in the semester). All other course materials will be distributed via Blackboard. The final three sessions or so will be organized by students; this includes selecting topics of interest as well as critical work on the topics assigned for reading and moderating the in-class discussion. close