Scrutiny

I just wanted to share with everyone the syllabus for my new course, 320: New Media and Society, which is offered in Communication and cross-listed in Information Science. I’m pretty proud of it, and hope it will be of some interest to those who might be reading this blog. Here’s the blurb:

We are all immersed in a complex and pervasive media culture, which makes it particularly difficult for us to recognize the complex relationship between media and society: how what we see, hear and read is in some ways the product of our society and its particular political, economic, and cultural shape, and how it also shapes our understanding of ourselves, our community, and our world. And at the moment, our media culture is undergoing a series of transformations - as new forms of entertainment, new venues for political debate, and new models of journalism emerge online, and as the established producers of media struggle to adapt to the challenge.

This course will interrogate how the cultural landscape has changed in relation to media and information technologies, how broadcast media and traditional publishing are converging with networked computing, and what implications these changes may have for society, politics, and culture. It will focus on cases drawn from new, information-based media - online news, blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, mashups, social networking applications, TiVo, video gaming, etc - but will examine them so as to understand the underlying relationship between media and society.

 http://www.tarletongillespie.org/syllabi/320.S08.html

I’ve asked my students, who are taking “Copyright in a Digital Age” with me, to be regularly posting on a blog, which you can find here. Right now, its really only been about a week, so they’re just getting started in thinking out the boundaries of the sociocultural questions we have to grapple with, and trying to get their head around the complexity that is copyright law. But they’re a very sharp bunch of juniors and seniors; I expect that, over the course of the fall semester, this blog will (a) reveal what happens when students are asked to systematically think out these issues, (b) may raise some fascinating perspectives and suggestions, and (c) could be another resource for those of us thinking about these issues. I may even ask some of my colleagues who appear on my syllabus, and are willing, to visit the blog and challenge my students a bit.
Feel free to explore the blog and comment if you like.

One of my favorite activities is putting together a syllabus; I love how I can look at a beautifully crafted course and see the whole exciting journey laid out, all the pieces already in place.

I just came across this course, taught by Michael Shanks, called Ten Things. Shanks is an archaeologist at Stanford, and his course draws together his field with work in the sociology and history of technology to help students rethink the relationship between technology, culture, and society. Each week focuses on one artifact, from the pyramids at Giza to Wedgewood china to the mouse, as  a way in to undermining some commonplace assumption about technology. Then each student develops their own portfolio on an artifact of their choice.

His notes on the final class, where he talks about “thing theory“, are a lovely synopsis of what the sociological study of technology, and particularly actor-network theory, have to offer.