We live in cultures which are increasingly organized around or saturated with digital information or new media. In this advanced course we will engage with some of the major commentators on relationships between new media and culture, working through a series of key ideas and problems focused around intersections of theory and practice. Instead of maintaining a domination/resistance conception of cultural industries and practices, we will explore complex dynamics of innovation and consumption across a variety of arenas. There will be scope to engage with notions of mobility, speed, reflection, reflexivity, information, virtuality, consumption, in the context of different spaces or objects (city; home; archive; gallery; brand, memory, sounds, visions, events, body, etc.) and practices (photography, art, writing, listening, tourism, learning, etc.) which exemplify contemporary debates about new media in cultural sociology.
We live in cultures which are increasingly organized around or saturated with digital information or new media. In this advanced course we will engage with some of the major commentators on relationships between new media and culture, working through a series of key ideas and problems focused around intersections of theory and practice. Instead of maintaining a domination/resistance conception of cultural industries and practices, we will explore complex dynamics of innovation and consumption across a variety of arenas. There will be scope to engage with notions of mobility, speed, reflection, reflexivity, information, virtuality, consumption, in the context of different spaces or objects (city; home; archive; gallery; brand, memory, sounds, visions, events, body, etc.) and practices (photography, art, writing, listening, tourism, learning, etc.) which exemplify contemporary debates about new media in cultural sociology.
