HU Credits: 3

Degree/Cycle: 2nd degree (Master)

Responsible Department: Communication & Journalism

Semester: 1st Semester

Teaching Languages: Hebrew

Campus: Mt. Scopus

Course/Module Coordinator: Dr. Lillian Boxman-Shabtai

Coordinator Email: lilly.boxman@mail.huji.ac.il

Coordinator Office Hours: Tuesday 11:00-12:00

Teaching Staff:
Dr. Lillian Boxman-Shabtai,
Ms. Hadas Schlussel

Course/Module description:
It has become common to claim that we live in a new kind of society and a historically distinctive era: the information society, the digital age. That changes in media technologies have produced a profound revolution in our everyday lives as well as in our larger social, cultural, economic and political structures. Despite the long history of communication, it seems that contemporary digital technologies have not only transformed how we use media, but have made media more central than ever to human civilization.

Focusing on a series of key words in digital culture studies, this course asks: how can we make sense of these developments in communication technologies, and what are their implications for self and society? What is the impact of technological change on personal identity, social relationships, and political behaviour? Is professional journalism viable or even necessary in an age of tweets, blogs and increasing numbers of amateur news images? Are new media really so new, and what happens to ‘old’ media like photography, television, books and music in a digital culture? And what might it mean for us to be perpetually available to others – and subject to perpetual surveillance by others - through mobile media?

Course/Module aims:
A critical introduction to the range of research fields dealing new digital media - their communicative characteristics and their social, cultural and political significance.

Learning outcomes - On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
To explain the major theories and topics in research on communication in the digital age.
To achieve a high level of competence in conceptualizing communicative, social, political and cultural questions concerning new media.
To produce in-depth critical readings of advanced theoretical writings and research in the field.
To compare and contrast central thinkers and schools of thought and to interpret and evaluate their points of similarity and difference.
To analyze contemporary empirical communications and cultural phenomenon in the light of the works studied.

Attendance requirements(%):
100

Teaching arrangement and method of instruction: Lectures, Exercises and Assignments

Course/Module Content:
1. Introduction and key word 1: Digital
2-3 Information
4-5 Remediation
6-7. Interface
8-9 Network
10-11 Platform
12-13 Mobile

Required Reading:
Week 1: "Digital"
Manovich, L. (2001) What is New Media? In The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press (18-55).


week 2-3: "information"

Gitelman, L. and Jackson, V. (2013) Introduction. In L. Gitelman (ed.) “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Pres. 1-14.

Hallinan, B. and Striphas, T. (2015) Recommended for you: The Netflix Prize and the production of algorithmic culture. New Media & Society 18(1): 117–137.


Week 4-5: "Remediation"

Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (1999) Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation. In Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 20-52.

Peters, J. P. (2015) Understanding Media. In The Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 13-52.


Week 6-7: "interface"

Turkle, S. (1997) A Tale of Two Aesthetics. In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York, Phoenix: Touchstone (29-49).

De Souza e Silva, A. and Sutko, D. (2011) Theorizing Locative Technologies Through Philosophies of the Virtual. Communication Theory 21: 23-42.


Week 8-9: "network"

Schwartz, O. (2011) Who moved my conversation? Instant messaging, intertextuality and new regimes of intimacy and truth. Media, Culture and Society 33(1): 71–87.

Aguiton. C. & Cardon, D. (2007) The Strength of Weak Cooperation: an Attempt to Understand the Meaning of Web 2.0. Communications & Strategies, 65: 51-65.




Week 10-11: "platform"

Vaidhyanathan, S. (2011) The Googlization of Us: Universal Surveillance and Infrastructural Imperialism. Chapter 3 of The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). Berkeley: University of California Press (82-114).

Gillespie, T. (2010) The Politics of Platforms. New Media & Society, 12: 347-364.

week 12-13: "mobile"

Farman, J. (2012) Introduction: The Pathways of Locative Media. In Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York, NY: Routledge: 1-16.

Goggin, G. (2017) Disability and haptic mobile media. New Media & Society 19(10) 1563–1580.


Week 14: Summary

Additional Reading Material:
Week 1: "digital"

Williams, R. (1976) ‘Culture’ in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 87-93.



Week 2-3: "information"

Beer, D. (2016) The Social Power of Algorithms. Information, Communication & Society 20(1): 1-13.

boyd and Crawford (2012) Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society 15 (5) 2012: 662–679.

Bucher, T. (2018) Introduction: Programmed Sociality. In If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.1-20.

Carlson, M. (2015) The Robotic Reporter. Digital Journalism 3(3) 416-431.

Castells, M. (2000) Chapter 1: The Information Technology Revolution. In The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume I: The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell (28-76).

Kennedy, H., Hill, R.L., Aiello, G. and Allen, W. (2016) The work that visualisation conventions do. Information, Communication & Society, 19(6): 715-735.

Lyon, D. (1995) The Roots of the Information Society Idea. In N. Heap, R. Thomas, G. Eimon, R. Mason and H. Mackay (eds) Information Technology and Society: A Reader. London: Sage and Open University Press (54-73).

Nunberg, G. (1996) Farewell to the Information Age. In G. Nunberg (ed) The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press (103-136).

Robins, K. and Webster, F. (1999) The Long History of the Information Revolution. In Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life. London: Routledge (89-110).

Turing, A. (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 59(236): 433-460. Also in: N. Wardip-Fruin and N. Montfort (eds.) The New Media Reader. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Pres. 49-64.

Van Dijck, J. (2005) From shoebox to performative agent: the computer as personal memory machine. New Media & Society 7(3): 311–332.


Week 4-5: "Remediation"

Bartmanski, D. and Woodward, I. (2015) The vinyl: The analogue medium in the age of digital reproduction. Journal of Consumer Culture, 15 (1): 3-27.

Gitelman, L. (2006) Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects. In Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1-22.

Hayles, N. K. (2004) Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis. Poetics Today 25(1): 67-90.

Livingstone, L. (2008) On the Mediation of Everything: ICA Presidential Address 2008. Journal of Communication 59: 1-18.

Manovich, L. (2013) Introduction. Software Takes Command. London, Bloomsbury: 4-51.

Mitchell, W.J.T. (2005) Addressing Media. In What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 201-221.

Nagy P. and Neff G. (2015) Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603385

Sofer, O. (2010) ‘Silent Orality’: Toward a Conceptualization of the Digital Oral Features in CMC and SMS Texts. Communication Theory 20: 387-404.

Sterne, J. (2006) The mp3 as cultural artifact. New Media and Society 8(5): 825–842.


Week 6-7: "Interface"

Dourish, P. (2004) A History of Interaction. In Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1-23.

Engell, L. (2013) The tactile and the index: From the remote control to the hand-held computer, some speculative reflections on the bodies of the will. NECSUS 2(2): 323–336.

Frosh, P. (2018) The Mouse, the Screen and the Holocaust Witness: Interface Aesthetics and Moral Response’, New Media & Society, 20(1): 351 - 368

Hayles, N. K. (1999) Toward Embodied Virtuality. Chapter 1 in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1-24).

Kirschenbaum, M. (2008) Introduction: Awareness of the Mechanism. In Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1-23.

Lammes, S. (2016) Digital mapping interfaces: From immutable mobiles to mutable images. New Media & Society, 19(7), 1019–1033.

Manovich, L. (2006) The Poetics of Augmented Space. Visual Communication 5(2): 219-240.

Ryan, M. L. (2001) Virtual Reality as Dream and as Technology. Chapter 2 in Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press (48-74).



Week 8-9: "Interface"

Benkler, Y. (2006) Political Freedom Part 2: The Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere. Chapter 7 in The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press, New Haven (212-272).
Available for download as a PDF file from:
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Download_PDFs_of_the_book

Carr, C. T. and Hayes, R. A. (2015) Social Media: Defining, Developing, and Divining, Atlantic Journal of Communication 23(1): 46-65. DOI: 10.1080/15456870.2015.972282.

boyd, d. and Ellison, N. (2008) Social Networking Sites: Definition, History, Scholarship, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13: 210-230.

Baym N. K. (2010) New Relationships, New Selves? Chapter 5 in Personal Connections in the Digital Age. London, Polity (99-121).

Belk, R. S. (2013) Extended Self in a Digital World. Journal of Consumer Research 40, 477-500.

Burgess, J. and Green J. (2009) The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: Participatory Culture Beyond the Professional-Amateur Divide. In Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds) The YouTube Reader. National Library of Sweden (89-107).

Deuze, M. (2006) Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture. The Information Society 22: 63-75.

Jenkins, H. (2004) The cultural logic of media convergence. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7(1): 33-43.

Marwick, A. (2015) Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy. Public Culture 27(1): 137-160.

Miller, D. et al (2016) Online and Offline Relationships. In How the World Changed Social Media. London: UCL Press, 100-114. Available free at: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/83038.

Miller, V. (2008) New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture, Convergence 14(4): 387-400.

Papacharissi, Z. (2015) Affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality, Information, Communication & Society, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2015.1109697

Slater, D. (2002) Social Relationships and Identity Online and Offline. In Lievrouw L. and Livingstone S. (Eds) Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs. London: Sage (533-546).

Song. F. W. (2010) Theorizing Web 2.0. Information, Communication & Society, 13:2, 249-275.

Wittel, A. (2001) Toward a Network Sociality. Theory, Culture & Society. 18(6): 51–76.


Week 10-11: "platform"

Fisher, E. and Mehozay, Y. (2018) How algorithms see their audience: media epistemes and the changing conception of the individual. Media, Culture & Society 41(8), 1176–1191.

Helmond A (2015) The platformization of the web: Making web data platform ready. Social Media + Society, 1(2).

Kim, J. (2012) The institutionalization of YouTube: From user-generated content to professionally generated content. Media, Culture & Society 34(1) 53–67.

Boxman-Shabtai, L. (2019) The practice of parodying: YouTube as a hybrid field of cultural production. Media, Culture, & Society 41(4), 3-20

Lawrence, E., Sides, J. and Farrell, H. (2010) Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics. Perspectives on Politics 8(1): 141-157.

McChesney, R. (2000) So Much for the Magic of Technology and the Free Market: The World Wide Web and the Corporate Media System, in Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (eds) The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Routledge.

Terranova, T. (2000) Free Labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. Social Text 63, 18(2): 33-58.

Tsatsou, P. (2011) Digital divides revisited: what is new about divides and their research? Media, Culture & Society 33(2): 317–331.

Van Dijck (2014) Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveillance & Society 12(2): 197-208.


Weel 12-13: "mobile"

Garcıa-Montes, J. M., Caballero-Munoz, D. and Perez-Alvarez, M. (2006) Changes in the self resulting from the use of mobile phones. Media, Culture & Society 28(1): 67–82.

Hjorth, L. and Pink, S. (2014) New visualities and the digital wayfarer: Reconceptualizing camera phone photography and locative media. Mobile Media & Communication 2(1): 40–57.

Lapenta, F. (2011) Geomedia: on location-based media, the changing status of collective image production and the emergence of social navigation systems. Visual Studies 26(1): 14-24.

Lüders, M. (2008) Conceptualizing Personal Media, New Media and Society 10(5): 683-702.

Packer, J. and Oswald, K. F. (2010) From Windscreen to Widescreen: Screening Technologies and Mobile Communication. The Communication Review 13: 309–339.

Rule, J. B. (2001) From Mass Society to Perpetual Contact: Models of Communication Technologies in Social Context. In J. E. Katz and M. A. Aakhus (eds.) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (242-254).

Verhoeff, N. and Cooley, H. R. (2014) The Navigational Gesture: Traces and Tracings at the Mobile Touchscreen Interface. Necsus 3 (1): 111–128.


Week 14: Summary

Course/Module evaluation:
End of year written/oral examination 0 %
Presentation 0 %
Participation in Tutorials 5 %
Project work 60 %
Assignments 25 %
Reports 0 %
Research project 0 %
Quizzes 0 %
Other 10 %
leading discussion

Additional information:
The language of instruction is Hebrew. The bibliography updated on the course Moodle site is the final version.