A note on auto-ethnography as a method:
http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095
Class Schedule
Week 1: The networked self and the social: a theoretical orientation
How does technology impact on the understanding of society, and on man’s own sense of the body?
Excerpts from:
Baudrillard, J. (1983) In the shadow of the silent majorities… or the end of the social and other essays. New York: Semiotext(e).
McLuhan, M. (1996) The Medium is the Massage. Berkeley: Ginko Press.
Week 2: Identity and subjectivity formation of the online self
How has the self become a media object? How is our sense of identity created and displayed publicly? What are the consequences?
Excerpts from:
Tiidenberg, K. (2018) SELFIES: Why We Love (and Hate) Them. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.
Lovink, G. (2016) On Social Media Ideology. E-flux #75, September.
Week 3: Affect theories
How do we understand and study the online self?
Excerpts from:
Hillis, K., Paasonen, S., and Petit, M., eds., NetworkedAffect. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press.
Tiidenberg, K. (2018) SELFIES: Why We Love (and Hate) Them. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.
Week 4: Virality and (hashtag) visibility
How do data and people become visible and sharable online? Does hashtag visibility form new collectivities?
Dean, J. (2016) Images without Viewers: Selfie communism. Foto-Museum blog post.
Jenkins, H., Ford, S., and Green, J. (2013) Spreadable Media. Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York and London: New York University Press.
Week 5: Celebrities, consumer culture and the ‘edited self’
How do networked technologies affect identity presentation and social interaction? How is the ‘edited self’ displayed in public? What happens when average people can influence large audiences through social networking platforms?
Excerpts from:
Senft, T. (2013) ‘Microcelebrity and the Branded Self’. In Hartley, Burgess and Bruns eds., Blackwell Companion to New Media Dynamics. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Abidin, C. (2014). ‘#In$tagLam: Instagram as a repository of taste, a brimming marketplace, a war of eyeballs’. In Berry and Schleser eds., Mobile Media Making in the Age of Smartphones.New York: Palgrave Pivot.
Week 6: Gender, sexuality and dating
How does the networked environment shape and reflect gendered subjectivities? How do forms of the online self become central to mediated sexual cultures, from flirting to dating to hooking-up?
Excerpts from:
Senft, T. (2008) Camgirls: celebrity and community in the age of social networks. New York: Peter Lang Publishing
Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism,Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Week 7
Recap and midterm exam
Week 8: Violence and visibility of the online self
What does it happen when the online self takes violent forms, when mundane practices such as Instagramming and taking selfies become instruments of violence?
Excerpts from:
Hegghammer T., ed (2017) Jihadi Culture: the art and social practice of militant islamists.Cambdrigde: Cambridge University Press.
Kuntsman, A. and Stein, R. (2015) Digital Militarism: Israel’s occupation in the social media age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Week 9:Networked emotions
How do sadness, anxiety, boredom, and other ‘moods’ of the self transform and manifest in the networked environment?
Excerpts from:
McDonough, T. ed. (2017). Boredom. Cambridge, Massachussetts: The MIT Press.
Broder, M. (2016) So Sad Today. New York and Boston: Grand Central Publishing.
Week 10: Affective networks
How does the production of affect drive the networks’ economy? What new forms of labor are produced within a networked environment?
Excerpts from:
Wark, M. (2013) The Spectacle of Disintegration: situationist passages out of the Twentieth century. London and New York: Verso.
Hillis, K., Paasonen, S., and Petit, M., eds., NetworkedAffect. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press.
Week 11: Dataveillance and algorithmic cultures
Is software innocent? Are data numb? What happens when emotions and feelings are constantly turned into data, controlled and sold to corporations and governments, leaked and hacked by criminals for malicious purposes?
Excerpts from:
van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveillance and Society 12(2).
Chun, W. (2011) Programmed Visions; Software and Memory. Cambridge, Massachussets: The MIT Press.
Recommended readings
Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017) , We Are Data. Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves, New York: New York University Press.
Cohen, J. E. (2016) The Surveillance-Innovation Complex: The Irony of the Participatory Turn, in Barney, D. et al. (eds)The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age, Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press.
Case studies on algorithmic predictability (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) and data mining scandals (Cambridge Analytica, etc)
Week 12 Mask design, anonymity, and new forms of collective action
Is there any free space left to design new identities and new forms of collective action escaping data mining, corporate, state and peer surveillance? and what premises are hidden in contemporary crypto-design projects?
Excerpts from:
Coleman, G. (2013). Anonymous in Context: the politics and power behind the mask. Internet Governance Papers. Waterloo, Ontario: The Centre for International Governance Innovation.
deSeriis, M. (2015). Improper names: collective pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Week 13: Privacy and the right to digital death
What is the meaning of privacy when public self-disclosure makes the real added value of the networked economy? Is there a way out from being constantly profiled and ranked? Can our digital selves be killed and forgotten?
Excerpts from:
Senft, T. (2015)’ The skin of the selfie’. In Bieber, A. ed. Ego Update: the future of digital identity. Dusseldorf: NRW Forum Publication.
Mayer-Schönberger, V. (2009) ‘Reintroducing Forgetting’. Chapter VI, in Delete. The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Week 14
Wrap up & recap