OutsideTheText

Classes for Fall 09 (University of Texas at Dallas)

• Introduction to Emerging Media-Undergrads: In 2006 Time named “You” as the person of the year. What at the time seemed like a clever ploy to sell extra magazines now appears to have accurately captured the zeitgeist, the sense that “you”—or “we”—now control the media. During the initial rapid growth of the internet, the dot com bubble of the 1990s, much ink was spilled and many pixels flickered to debate the cultural impact of the digital network, and for a short time after the bubble burst, those who saw the internet as a passing fad seemed to have their day. But what is now clear after the rise of “Web 2.0” is that the internet changes things—and by "things," I mean everything. The way we share, create, and disseminate knowledge has fundamentally changed. What the particular contours of this change are have yet to be revealed, but I think it is clear that the next moment in our culture will be remarkably different from the prior. The focus of this class is in understanding this change, particularly the way that media has changed and is changing. Accordingly, this class will serve as an introduction for Emerging Media and Communications majors and serve as a building block for the rest of your coursework.
• History and Theory of Emerging Media-EMAC 5300: This class is a broad introduction to the theories which have come to influence how we understand the relation of media and culture. In order to understand how “emerging media” or “digital media” are shaping and reshaping our culture it is important to first have a grounding in a range of traditional approaches for theorizing the effects of media. Thus this class is divided between considering some of the canonical texts in this field (Plato, Marx, Foucault, etc.) and works which refigure these approaches based on the rise of digital media (Bolter and Grusin, Shirky, Manovich, etc.).