This summer, learn how to critically analyze and help shape developments in new media. Digital media profoundly shape our lives: social media, apps, software and networked devices have transformed almost every area of work and play. This summer, think critically about how digital media impact our culture, from how media relate to the representation of race, gender, and identity, to how new technologies impact democracy worldwide.
NWMEDIA 90, 3 units
Examining Sociocultural Issues through TikTok
Meg Everett
Summer Session C | TR 2-5pm | 118 Social Sciences Building
TikTok has been downloaded over 2.6 billion times worldwide. Apps like TikTok shape culture while simultaneously being a product of it. Thus, it is the goal of this course to disentangle and deconstruct the multiple and overlapping relationships between the platform, markets, and governance with creators, consumers, communities, and content. We begin the course with a high-level view of platform studies and consider a variety of approaches for investigating TikTok and the ethical implications of these methodologies. Turning to TikTok’s algorithm, we will work to uncover how lines of obscure code have a very visible impact on the content we see, the information we consume, and the communities we create. We then shift to critical perspectives on identity and performance, knowledge-making and dissemination, creator visibility, and content moderation. We conclude the course with a discussion on what TikTok’s culture of remix and collaboration reveals about the politics of authorship within the new attention economy.
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NWMEDIA 151AC, 4 units
Transforming Tech: Issues and Interventions in STEM and Silicon Valley
Matthew Berry
Summer Session C | Online
In this course, we will study major tech industry controversies and heavily criticized tech products, policies, and effects, including technologies used at the U.S.-Mexico border, social media platforms’ spread of disinformation and fake news, racial bias in algorithms, and internet trolling and harassment. We will also examine tech companies’ long-running tendency to exclude women and non-Asian minorities, and how tech workers have occasionally come under fire for the industry’s harms. Students will be required to brainstorm and design their own interventions into the workings of the tech sector to make it more inclusive, equitable, and diverse.
Meets the American Cultures Requirement, Social & Behavioral Sciences L&S Breadth, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Ethics requirement, and the Media Studies Requirement Group B: Specialization in a Medium.
This class will be taught via ASYNCHRONOUS REMOTE INSTRUCTION.
Time conflicts ARE allowed for this class.