Department of English

How and when do media become digital? What does digitization afford and what is lost as worlds become digitized? As lots of things around us turn digital, have we started telling stories, sharing experiences, and replaying memories differently? The course aims to engage with these among many other questions related to digital media through a constellation of approaches–critical technoscience studies, media archaeology, digital humanities, cultural theory, and political economy–attempting to synergistically compare them and investigating the fault lines between them. Course readings about digital media practices and infrastructures shall help us explore the shifting perspectives about texts, bodies, and media in academic and popular discourse on “New Media.” Course activities, which will be graded, include indulging in the (un)usual practices of Tweeting and Instagramming as well as exercises such as data visualization and dissecting layers of media objects. You will blog (at least thrice) about the readings in the class and present on one chosen article from the syllabus. The final project could take the form of either a critical essay (of 3000 words) or production of artwork.