The aim of this module is to investigate different models of critical thought and apply them to digital media and its associated technological infrastructure. We analyze and question new media forms and technologies such as the smartphone, social media, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and use the tools of critical theory to dissect and critique the discourse surrounding them. Paying particular attention to how various forms of media themselves (both old and new) attempt to shape our understanding of technology, we ask not just what these new technologies do, but also who they do it to, and on whose behalf they are doing it. Through this activity the student will develop a more critically aware understanding of recent developments in media technology, one that is informed by major theories of 20th and 21st Century thought.
Theoretical Frameworks
Key concepts, theories and frameworks; modernism and postmodernism; postcolonial theory and orientalism; feminism; psychoanalysis; marxism and ideology.
Key Writers and Thinkers
Important theorists and their key ideas, including Marx, Freud, Foucault, Said, Butler and Fisher.
The Shock Of The New
Modern, modernism and modernity. Key concepts of modernism - technology, progress and the 'shock of the new'. Historical context. Modernism in art, design and architecture. Modernism as framework for understanding contemporary technological discourse.
Marxism, Politics and Ideology
Key concepts of marxism - historical materialism, the base and the superstructure, the economics of inequality. Ideology and false consciousness. Analysing contemporary media as ideological apparatus. New technology as ideology.
The Construction Of The Self
The origins of psychoanalysis. Freudian concepts of the self, the conscious and the unconscious. Reading film and TV by means of psychoanalytic theory. Affect and the "user experience".
The Construction of Identity
The construction of personal reality. Identity and politics. Gender and identity. Colonialism and orientalism. Ethnicity and Globalisation. The construction of the other. Religion, society and identity. Virtual identity. Technology as vector of injustice, inequality and oppression.
Beyond The Modern
The critique of modernism. Key concepts of postmodernism - reappropriation, irony and pastiche, dystopian futures, end of history. Poststrucuralism and deconstruction. The death of the author. Postmodernism in film, pop music and contemporary digital culture.
| Module Content & Assessment | |
|---|---|
| Assessment Breakdown | % |
| Other Assessment(s) | 100 |