COMS 200 | Communication, Culture, Policy
Course Description:
With a special focus on digital and participatory media, this course invites students to explore the relationships between theories of communication, critical accounts of culture, and the policy frameworks that govern media technology. Starting from the basic premise that communication is about conversation and the transmission of meaning, the course develops an account of how global social, economic, technological and political relations come embedded with a conception of everyday communication and culture.
COMS 300 | Media/Networks/Culture
Course Description:
From a series of key critical perspectives, this course offers an overview of the digitally-mediated network society. The diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into everyday life has significantly altered personal, economic and political relations. This class explores the changes, with help from theory in the social construction of technology. It asks the following questions: What does it mean for the social order to adopt a network form? How have ICTs changed the means by which we fulfill our material and cultural needs? What kinds of strategies and tactics do they afford politically, for personal and collective becoming? After establishing some important theoretical paradigms, the course proceeds with a critical evaluation of four networked media practices.
COMS 400 | Space/Time/Technology
Course Description:
This seminar invites ambitious students to explore the relationships between space, time, and technology. Through a sustained engagement with philosophical and social-theoretical texts, the seminar poses the following questions: How do technological media induce a spatiotemporal horizon of expectations? How do they shape, or govern meaning in experience and language? What is their relationship to power? While we adapt technological media to our various economic, social and political interactions, how do they in turn configure our cultural sense of place and self? Digital technologies, for example, have had a tectonic impact on the organization and maintenance of modern societies; space-time compression is a deep-seated cultural force at work in their design. The seminar will elaborate thematic responses to this ‘informational’ moment that we currently inhabit. Weekly readings build on broad themes that include embodied experience, shared meaning, temporality, rationality, technology, and the idea of mediation.