Is Instagram listening in to your conversations? Why does TikTok’s FYP seem to have you so figured out? What does AI mean for the future of social media (and humanity)? And how did we get here?
In this course, we explore these questions and more by examining the relationship between society and emerging communication technologies known as “social media,” including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more. While these technologies are often regarded with fear or awe, the purpose of this course is to provide historical context for their emergence and development and break down the mythologies surrounding social media by developing methods of analysis and critical understanding. To do so, we draw from a broad range of perspectives to critically evaluate the impact of social media on cultural production, identity, activism and social movements, branding and advertising, celebrity, politics, news, and labor, among others. Throughout this course, we engage with research from scholars who study social media as well as popular media to critically consider the stories people tell about social media. Throughout this course, we pay particular attention to the “sociotechnical,” the relationship between the technical affordances of a technology and the social norms of a user community. Students also have the opportunity to gain basic practical social media skills: understanding the landscape, learning “best practices,” and using different social media technologies throughout the class to create and disseminate content.
Course Topics: Technological Determinism, Media Panics, Pre-Histories of Social Media, Microcelebrity and the Influencer Industry, Algorithms, Advertisers and Brand Safety, Regulation and Moderation, Access and Restriction, Hashtags and Memes, Social Movements, Mis/Disinformation, Ghost Work and Invisible Labor, Platform Death, AI
Student Comments
This course is well structured and relevant. Each topic was easy to connect with another topic, which genuinely helped me keep up with every new thing I was learning. The media project was definitely my favorite since it gave us creative liberty to make the video however we wanted and still be able to talk and apply a class concept to our daily social media use.
I like all of the concepts in this class. The course content is informative for a student studying technology and what’s happening in the world. I like how the syllabus is up to date with these real-world events.
This course offers essential and up-to-date concepts that you need to understand regarding technology, AI, and social media. I believe that information can help you in any industry in the future.
Student Media
Throughout the course, students are given the opportunity to put course concepts into practice by making their own media. A few examples of student work appear below, made during “Analog Day”–a day we collectively log off and discuss the complexities of
Dr. Sarah Edwards 