ENG 160A: Digital Media and Culture Monday, Wednesday, Thursday: 11-11:50 a.m. Lown 2

Transcription

1 ENG 160A: Digital Media and Culture Monday, Wednesday, Thursday: 11-11:50 a.m. Lown 2 Dr. Kyle Stevens Office: Rabb 217 Office Hours: Thursdays, 12-2 pm stevensk@brandeis.edu Teaching Assistants: Kurt Cavender (kcavende@brandeis.edu) Office hours: Scott Moore (semoore@brandeis.edu) Office hours: Course Description We are clearly in the midst of a major cultural transformation, one wrought by the advent of a range of digital technologies and their many applications. In this class, we will explore what it means to live in the so-called Information Age by asking two central questions: How have the stories we tell about ourselves changed? And how has their study changed? We will consider what kind of people what idea of the human recent technology conditions, as well as how humanist thinkers are meeting the challenge to theorize digital culture. While we will view digital technology as propelling a cultural sea-change, we will also see it in its relation to literary traditions. We will explore digital technology with questions about the history of literary technologies: In what way, exactly, should it matter to bibliophiles and cinephiles that the objects they love are disappearing? What new aesthetic possibilities does digitalia bring, and what are their political implications? How does recent fiction comment on new ways of thinking introduced by computing devices? How do the latest platforms affect what it is to analyze a text? We will read a range of fictional texts from aural plays to interactive fiction to avant-garde visual essays as well as a range of philosophical and theoretical writings. By the end of the course, you will have thought deeply about how new technology helps or hinders us as readers, viewers, listeners, and citizens. Objectives: This course will invite you to think about the stories and technologies that connect people. That is, it will invite you to think about narrative and contemporary technology, familiarize you with digital tools developed for the study of cultural objects, and introduce you to the major perspectives on the digital revolution generated by scholars in the humanities. You will gain expertise in the core issues and keywords (interactivity, hypertextuality, convergence, etc.) and also think and write critically about a range of urgent topics, including: the sorts of experiences and multi-planar thinking demanded by digital technologies and software culture; what it means to occupy a place in a globalized world; the relation of the sciences and humanities; the relations of technology, politics, and aesthetics; and how we think, or should think, about the relation of technology and culture. Beyond its appeal to anyone interested in negotiating their increasingly technologized and visual world, those interested in fiction, philosophy, critical theory, cognitive science, journalism, cinema studies, and media studies will profit from reflecting upon the values subtending the shift from print culture to digital culture, upon the structures of entertainment forms, and upon the idea that it is not just technology that connects us these days, but the stories told through it, and the story we tell about that technology. 1

2 Required Texts: The Social Media Reader = (designated below by SMR ) Jose van Dijk, The Culture of Connectivity The Room (ipad game) Other readings will be available on Latte ( L ) or online ( O ) Assignments Class participation, weekly readings, one group presentation, one 5-page paper, one aural/video essay, and one final seminar paper. Participation: 20% Group Presentation: 10% Essay 1: 20% Video or Aural Essay: 20% Final Essay: 30% The first essay will ask you to closely read one of the assigned fictional texts, and to use the fruits of their close reading to evaluate at least one of the theoretical treatments we ve discussed in class. The video or aural essay will ask you to re-imagine, re-fashion, and/or re-purpose their print argument from their first paper. For your group presentations, you will present a case study of a new technology (e.g., digital paper, e-ink, thin film substrates, Google Glass). The final essay will be about 10 pages, and there will be options for topics. Graduate students will be graded on participation and a final seminar paper (20-25 pages). Schedule of Meetings and Assignments Week One: Meaning and Use: Studying Digital Media January 13: Introduction to the class January 15: Discuss Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) January 16: P.J. Rey, The Myth of Cyberspace (O) and James Carey, Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph (L) Week Two: Language, Storage, Cognition, and Communication January 20: No Class: MLK Day January 22: Discuss Janet Murray, Affordances of the Digital Medium (L) January 23: Tim O Reilly, What Is Web 2.0? (SMR) and Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (L) Recommended: Susan Hockey, The History of Humanities Computing in Companion to Digital Humanities and Julia Kristeva, Word, Dialogue, and Novel 2

3 Week Three: Social Media, Desire, and the Sharing Imperative January 27: Debates about Selfies in Slate Magazine (O); James Franco, The Meanings of the Selfie (O); Danah Boyd, Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle (SMR) January 29: Patrick Davison, The Language of Internet Memes (SMR); Clay Shirky, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (SMR) January 30: E. Gabriella Coleman, Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls: The Politics of Transgression and Spectacle (SMR); Dan Tynan, Thank You, Porn! 12 Ways the Sex Trade Has Changed the Web (O) Week Four: We, the Produsers February 3: Jose van Dijck, Chapters 1-2 of The Culture of Connectivity A Critical History of Social Media (2013) February 6: van Dijck, Chapters 3-4 February 7: Julian Dibbel, Viruses Are Good for You (L); Felix Stalder, Between Democracy and Spectacle: The Front End and Back End of the Social Web (SMR) Week Five: We, the Audience February 10: Jay Rosen, The People Formerly Known as the Audience (SMR), Henry Jenkins, Interactive Audiences (L) and Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry (SMR) February 12: Adam Davis, Native images: the otherness and affectivity of the digital body (O) February 13: Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (SMR) February 17-21: NO CLASS Week Six: Technology, Images, and the Human Condition February 24: Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (L) February 26: Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Era of its Technological Reproducibility and Convolute N: On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress (L) February 27: Essay 1 Due; Discuss Essay 2; Screen video essays Recommended: Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture Week Seven: The Internet and the Politics of Control March 3: Lawrence Lessig: REMIX: How Creativity is Being Strangled By the Law (SMR), Douglas Thomas, Innovation, Piracy, and the Ethos of New Media (L) March 5: Robert McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (select chapters) (L) March 6: McChesney, continued 3

4 Week Eight: Technology and Aesthetics, Part I: Home Entertainment Machines March 10: The Room ipad Game March 12: Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture (L); Ilya Zambeski, How Will Historians Study Video Games? (O) March 13: Excerpts from Jaron Lanier s You Are Not a Gadget (L) Week Nine: Home Entertainment and Interactivity March 17: Listen to The War of the Worlds (L) March 19: Discuss Shade by Andrew Plotkin (O) March 20: Work on audiovisual essays Recommended: Roald Dahl s The Sound Machine ; Jonathan Sterne, Format Theory from MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012); Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999) Week Ten: March 24: Video or Aural Essay Due; Presentations March 26: Presentations March 27: Presentations Week Eleven: Technology and Aesthetics, Part II: Visual and Temporal Logics March 31: Discuss The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000); visit Rijks Museum in class April 2: Discuss Domietta Torlasco, Digital Impressions: Writing Memory after Agnes Varda (L) April 3: Lev Manovich, What is Digital Cinema? (L) and Thomas Elsaesser, The Return of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century (L) Recommended: Vivian Sobchack, Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of Quick Time ; Mark B.N. Hansen, Digital Technics Beyond the Last Machine : Thinking Digital Media with Hollis Frampton (2012); David Joselit, After Art Week Twelve: Posthumans, Posthumanism I April 7: Discuss Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983) or Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) April 9: Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (L) April 10: Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (L) Week Thirteen: Posthumans, Posthumanism II April 14: Haraway, continued April 15-16: NO CLASS 4

5 Week Fourteen: April 21: NO CLASS April 23: Katherine Hayles, Excerpt from How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (L) April 24: Hayles, How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine from How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (L) Recommended: Vannevar Bush, As We May Think Week Fifteen: April 28: Wrap Up/TBA Final essay due: TBA Links: Rey on Cyberspace: o Selfie debates in Slate Magazine: o nd_facebook_are_tiny_bursts_of_girl_pride.html o _esteem_why_the_photo_sharing_network_is_even_more_depressing.html James Franco on the selfie: o Dan Tynan on porn: o Adam Davis on digital bodies in movies: o Zambeski on art history and video games: o Andrew Plotkin s Shade: o 5