Subject Area: Media, Culture and Technology

Media are centrally implicated in our lives – both public and private. From election campaigns to radicalisation; from transnational personal relationships to gaming; from the constitution of the global economy to online dating; media technologies play a crucial role. They have the potential to create social and political change as well as to disrupt personal lives in ways unimaginable a decade or so ago.

In this course you will examine current, ‘live’ topics in media, using relevant concepts and frameworks to investigate and understand present-day media-related issues. During the course, you will be encouraged to capture and study media-related events and developments as they unfold. At the beginning of the semester three to four significant, exemplary, on-going topics, news stories, or developments involving the media will be chosen. The rest of the semester, including lectures and tutorial readings and discussions, will be organised around two to three broad themes that are based on the chosen topics.

The key focus will be on the application of relevant theories, frameworks and concepts on these topics, and an exploration of appropriate methodologies for their analysis. The topics covered could include, for instance, digital media affordances, political communication as public strategy, online radicalisation, social media use and counter-publics, the political economy of IT industries, or surveillance and security, covering the themes of media in the public domain and media in the private domain, as well as the intersections of the two. The methodologies discussed could, in turn, include textual analysis and deconstruction, auto-ethnography, and conjunctural analysis. The emphasis will be on situating media analysis and theory within broader socio-cultural and political contexts.