Department of English

Digital technologies have fully saturated our culture. From smartphones to smart-homes, fitbits to tablets, our everyday lives are digitally infused. My watch tracks my vitals. My Xbox listens to my voice (awaiting command). My phone tells me when friends are in their favorite pub or coffee shop or when they are broadcasting their lives. And this digital conditionality, whether positive or negative, has serious implications for who we are, how we communicate, and how we construct real and digital identities. Moreover, it impacts how we market ourselves to the working world, what kind of skills are required to be effective and affective digital citizens, or even what kind of affluence is demanded to have a digital existence. As such, this course will pick up with the depths to which digital mediation has impacted (if not infected) everyday discourse, drawing attention to the qualities and considerations necessary to one’s success in digital culture (from writing for machine audiences to crafting digital identities to being attentive to matters of experience design).

In order to address these matters, however, this course will be driven by the following guiding inquiry: What is our relationship with our technologies? To answer this question and situate it as a way of thinking through larger cultural implications, this course will bring together new media studies, post-digital perspectives, and rhetorical concepts and constructs to guide students into and through the sophisticated practices of knowing, doing, and making in emergent and established forms of mediation.

The grade for this course will be determined by a combination of class participation, reading responses (reading logs), multimedia productions, writing and peer review, and other forms of student-based and/or experience oriented assessment (particularly in relation to one’s own sense of learning).

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