Handbook

Note: The course code for this course was previously ARTS2095

Living in a networked world means that who we are is inseparable from the platforms, technologies, and infrastructures that surround us. This course develops your reflexive and critical understanding of how identity co-evolves with networked technologies used to express social belonging, shape labour and leisure, texture embodied experiences, and contribute to cultural memories. You will explore how networked media informs what it means to be a social being in a surveillance society, an individual crafting your selfhood through networked practices, and a consumer, producer, and worker under digital capitalism. Along with developing your scholarly understanding of networked identity, you will get hands-on experience with digital tools and environments which constrain, enable or complicate forms of self-representation. Not all communities or social identities have equal opportunity to access or use such systems and tools, which often reproduce inequalities along the lines of race, class, sexuality and gender. The course invites you to ask how digital technologies inform who we can become within the socio-political and commercial power dynamics of networked media environments.