Digital Cultures

This course is about internet culture and how our lives are mediated through platforms, algorithms and artificial intelligens (AI). Central in this course is to understand online practises, communities and cultures as shaped by both technology and culture. The goal is to strenghten your critical perspective on the present by increasing the understanding and knowledge for how digital infrastructure shape trends, self-understandings, politics and community.

At another level, the course sheds light on different internet visions; from internet as a democratizing force to internet as a waste of time, in order to show how technologies are shaped both technologically and culturally. By doing this, the course highlights technology (platforms, algorithms and AI) but also users and media narratives and interpretations of them.

The goal is to develop tools for understanding our mediated present, and critically evaluate the role of digital technology in the development of new expressions, identities and relations. The course has a special interest in internet phenomena that are rejected as trivial or meaningless. In addition, we study such phenomena from a user perspective and how users develop new and unexpected forms of interaction and creativity.

The approach to digital cultures is sociotechnical and combine perspectives from Science and technology studies (STS) with internet studies in order to show how technology and society shape each other.

Students who complete this course have knowledge of:

• different narratives and visions related to the internet
• contemporary internet phenomena
• how digital infrastructures shape trends, identity, politics and community
• sociotechnical perspectives on internet culture

Students who complete this course have skills in:

• analyzing contemporary digital cultures in a sociotechnical perspective
• critically evaluating the role of technological and societal changes related to digital technology in new internet practices
• doing an independent analysis of digital cultures and articulate findings in the academic genre

The course is organized as a net-based study based on video-lectures, literature and small assignments in the course's online modules, primarily multiple choice tasks.

Compulsory activities: small assignments in online modules + one written assignment