TuTh, 5:45 PM-7:00 PM, BH 109

Fulfills College S&H Requirement

Instructor: Richard Edwards
E-Mail: edwards9@iupui.com

This course aims to acquaint the students with the history, theory,
and practices of digital communication technologies through an
emphasis on their cultural dimensions and impact. This course
investigates a series of questions central to understanding this new
and dynamically changing area: What is new media? What are the basic
characteristics of new media? What are the major mobile, networked,
youth, and visual cultures of new media? What roles do race,
ethnicity, class and gender play in new media cultures?

New media is an emerging technological, communicative and cultural
framework through which we comprehend and evaluate changes in the
way we work, the way we learn, and the way we live in the digital
age. After an historical overview of new media, students will engage
multiple theories and approaches to comprehend the cultural turns
brought about by today’s digital technologies. We will explore the
current directions and latest debates on the cultures of new media
through readings by Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture), Clay Shirky
(Here Comes Everybody), Lisa Nakamura (Digitizing Race), danah boyd
(zephoria.org), and S. Craig Watkins (The Young and the Digital),
among others.

Each week there will be lectures on the key topics of this course.
Additionally, students will join a private social network set up
specifically to facilitate interactions outside of the classroom and
to create an online space for further discussions of the lectures
and readings. There will be exams and written assignments. Some of
the written assignments will be blog posts related to course
material, and students will be required to read and respond to these
blog posts. And since new media involves the intersection of theory
and practice, there will be one multimedia-based project. The
multimedia project will use freely available web-based tools.