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Dr Alison Powell

This course is available on the MSc in Media and Communications, MSc in Media and Communications (Data and Society) and MSc in Media and Communications (Research). This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

In order to accommodate academic staff research leave and sabbaticals, and in order to maintain smaller seminar group sizes, this course is capped, meaning that there is a limit to the number of students who can be accepted. Whist we do our best to accommodate all requests, we cannot guarantee you a place on this course.

This course provides an historical, theoretical and methodological basis through which to assess the social and cultural transformations related to digital media infrastructures and related social practices. It focuses on the materiality and affordances of new media, as well as on the social transformations that have co-evolved, focusing on emerging media of the past, present and future. It critiques and questions the assumptions about the transformation of social and cultural life but also attempts to help students develop conceptual strategies beyond critique. Conceptual approaches draw from materialist studies of media and communication, as well as science and technology studies. Topics include but are not limited to: alternative and activist media and futures, the political economy and ecology of digital media, the politics of algorithms, remembering and forgetting, the anthroposcene, artificial intelligence, data and AI ethics.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars totalling a minimum of 20 hours across Lent Term. This year, some or all of this teaching will be delivered through a combination of online lectures and in-person classes/classes delivered online. This course includes a reading week in Week 6 of term.

Students will complete a 1,500 word formative essay or creative proposal. They will also receive formative feedback on class participation and on a formative assignment.

• Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong and Thomas Keenan (2006) New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. London: Routledge.
• Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Kitchin Rob and Dodge, Martin (2011) Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life.
• Lukers, Kristin (2007) Salsa Dancing into the Social sciences: Research in an age of info-glut. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Marvin, Carolyn (1989) When Old Technologies Were New. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Turner, Fred (2005) "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community." Technology and Culture 46: 485-512.
• Turkle, Sherry (2011) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
• Vaidhyanathan, Siva (2008) The Googlization of Everything (And why we should worry). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the ST.

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.

We look at the connections between expectations about media technologies and ideas about the future - and we look at the particular features of today's media and their imagined futures.

Students’ comments

"Did a great job of breaking down abstract concepts and relating them in the seminar. Readings were very informative, interesting."