Digital Media Power and Practice
Course Description
In our contemporary media landscape, self-produced digital media artifacts (from YouTube, TikTok, Reddit posts, etc) are garnering increased attention for the role they play in shaping culture and politics. This course takes everyday, self-produced media texts seriously to examine a set of critical questions. Together we will ask: How do everyday digital media practices mediate what we know about ourselves, each other, and the world? How do media expand or place limits on particular discourses? What is the relationship between everyday media practices and the media industries and institutions that organize capital, materials, bodies, and the natural world? How do media produce discourses that impact our experiences of culture and who or what has power?
In this course we will consider the politics of representation as inseparable from media production practices and the media industries that promote, sustain, and sometimes, contest them. For instance, it is important, when writing about the video of a YouTube celebrity to also consider the aesthetic, logistical, and practical choices involved in production, as well as the ways in which videos on the platform circulate and gain resonance, in part due to algorithms and bottom-line prerogatives of corporations who stand to profit (in this case, Google).
Each student will begin or continue a path of analyzing media through media production, concluding with a public event in which the class will guide a general audience through a discussion of how to “read” a variety of media artifacts (or your choosing). We will then collectively produce a course blog that will re-present our learning from the quarter, for public circulation.
Course Learning Objectives
· Become familiar with a variety of methods for analyzing media texts.
· Gain experience with transforming media analysis into public scholarship.
· Think critically about representation and its relationship to power; social media and social formations; theories of self-produced media, with an emphasis on digital media production and circulation; and media activism.
· Practice integrating media analysis and production into scholarly projects, and vice versa.
· *Develop an existing media production project (not necessarily applicable to all students)