Seminar: Special Issues in Social Media
Seminar: Special Issues in Social Media
Dr. Carmel Vaisman
Seminar description:
This seminar is designed to support a research project a student wishes to undertake within the field of digital culture studies. In addition to supporting the various frameworks and topics offered by the various courses in the track, the seminar offers a selection of interdisciplinary interpretive frameworks that are designed to counter novel challenges presented by contemporary technoculture, and uses them to engage emergent digital phenomena and enable a broader perspective on the field. The interpretive frameworks involve 'hacking' metaphors, media archeology and the history of science, philosophy of technology, affect theory, animation, software studies and more. The selected topics include digital genres such as gaming, selfies and cute cats; technologies such as social robotics, algorithmic agency and virtual /augmented realities; and cultural phenomena such as online identities before birth and after death, romantic relationships with virtual characters, tapping into the collective intelligence and wisdom of crowds, doing religious rituals online and more.
Seminar requirements
Readings and Participation. Seminars are based entirely upon reading assigned materials prior to class and discussing them in class. All students are expected to actively participate in these discussions and will be graded for it. The discussions will be structured as debates between students/groups or gamified exercises, designed to practice argumentation styles, perspective shifts and develop research related skills.
Final seminar/term paper. Students should have a preliminary direction or rough interest for a paper topic as early as possible so the steps for pursuing it could be elucidated and exercised in class. However, it is also possible to take up a new pursuit introduced during classes. One of the lessons (week 8) will be replaced with personal meetings to discuss the specifics and jumpstart your research project. Students will submit a seminar paper on a topic of their choice by TBA. Term papers differ from seminar papers only in their scope and length but require the same research skills and are submitted by 4/2/18.
Recommended Length of the papers (double space or 1.5 space; title page and bibliography not included) is between 18 and 25 pages for seminar papers and between 8 and 13 for term papers.
Grading
Your seminar grade will be calculated as follows:
Participation/readings/in-class exercises 30%
Seminar/term paper 70%
