A chief concern for today’s networked age is how we develop, present, and manage our identities in digital spaces. We find easy examples for this concern in our understanding of how companies track our buying habits for precisely targeted marketing campaigns; in our fearing that our identities can be stolen for someone else’s financial gain, in our increasing awareness that security agencies monitor our activities. In each of these examples–and in many others we could list–our anxiety can be traced to not knowing what information we are producing and, further, not knowing who can access that information we produce. In short: we need to know more about how we are known.
While these concerns have intensified through the rise of digital networks and our increasing use of those networks, the underlying problems reach at least as far back as the birth of the western tradition. In the long rhetorical tradition, concerns over self-presentation and practices for establishing good character have provided an ongoing task for becoming effective and engaged public citizens. As such, this course will draw heavily from rhetorical understandings of ethos–character, credibility, ethics–to develop an understanding of self-construction and self-presentation through digital media and online networks. The course, then, will be an opportunity to develop an understanding for and facility with how digital media can produce, collect, share, and shape identities and how we might use those digital media to further manage our online selves for academic, professional, and public purposes.
Assignments
Reading Responses – 10%
These will be ongoing short, focused video/audio responses to our readings and will serve as conversation starters for our class discussions.
Case Study – 20%
Each student will be responsible for presenting one extended case study that analyzes a recent case/event relevant to our courses readings for that day/week.
Off Grid Analysis – 30%
This assignment will include a short multimedia essay that analyzes your gameplay for Off Grid, a game designed to teach its player about metadata and information security.
Quantified Self(ie) – 40%
This is a semester long data collection and presentation project that asks you to record and present an (reasonable) account of your own activities in and through digital media. This assignment will include: a brief proposal; a short presentation; and a final report that uses information visualization techniques to present a coherent story of complex data.
NOTE:
Many of our assignments will be opportunities for us to research, collect, and present many examples of the kinds of media we will be reading about. We will make use of free and easily accessible software applications to accomplish these tasks (i.e. video editing, information visualization, document design). No prior knowledge of these applications will be required, but students must be willing to explore and practice the software introduced in the course.
Required Texts and Materials
Marwick, Alice E. Status update: Celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. Yale University Press, 2013.
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. Delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Rainie, Harrison, and Barry Wellman. Networked: The new social operating system. MIT Press, 2012.
Rettberg, Jill Walker. Seeing Ourselves Through Technology. Palgrave Pivot, 2014.
Rudder, Christian. Dataclysm: Who We Are When No One is Looking. Crown Publishers, 2014.
Vaughn, Brian K. and Marcos Martin, The Private Eye, Panel Syndicate, 2014.
Off Grid, Semaeopus Games, 2014.
Several other readings will be made available via course site may include: Aristotle, On Rhetoric (selection); Jim Corder (selected essays); Michel Foucault, “Self-Writing”; Isocrates, Antidosis (selection); Nigel Thrift, “Lifeworld, Inc.”; Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory(selections).
