ENG3980-01.Spec Top: Digital Media Theory.F13.McKain,Aaron

Abstract

Friendship, knowledge, love, sex, the private/public divide, the news, the idea of violence, the idea of copyright, what art looks and sounds like, what political activism and protest feels like: In a few scant years, the digital media era has fundamentally changed the nature of how we interact with each other, and engage with the world, politically, aesthetically, and ethically. All of which should be pretty obvious to anyone who stops to think about it. But the digital media era encourages us to neither stop nor think, which means the real question – and the question of this course – is this: Do we like the changes – some of which change the very nature of what it means to be human – that 21st century technology, and its current implementations, hath wrought? In search of answers, and using a methodology grounded in rhetorical theory, we’ll rummage through the political and cultural artifacts (from Facebook and Twitter to Skrillex and Anonymous) and critics and theorists (some brilliant, some real dumb) that have come to define the digital media age.