COMM 480 - Moral Economies of Digital Media

Units: 4
What are social and other emerging media? Who gains? How are they transforming the media landscape and how we inhabit the world? Analysis of a range of media tools and their implications toward what Trebor Scholz calls “participation literacy.”

Prerequisites: Department consent.
Possible Instructional Methods: Entirely On-ground, or Entirely Online, or Hybrid.
Grading: A-F or CR/NC (student choice).
Course Typically Offered: Variable Intermittently

Student Learning Outcomes - Upon successful completion of this course students will be able to:

Identify and critique instances of technological determinism in popular discourse on social media technologies;
Critically evaluate methodologies employed by studies of social media use;
Describe social media practices among various social groups, differentiated by age, gender, race, and sexual identity, among others;
Understand performances of identity in social media;
Critically evaluate the potential for social media technologies to facilitate the formation of identities, communities, activist movements, and consumer markets;
Articulate some of the ethical problems posed by emerging social media technologies.