Digital Futures: Media Technologies and Social Transformation Around the World

4 credits · Undergraduate credit

What assumptions about self and society do media technologies encode as universally valid and "culture-free"? What role do media play in shaping our sense of what is right or just? How are media implicated in social change or continuity? In what ways do activists and groups elevate particular communicative technologies and decry others as key to sustaining their existing social world or constructing alternatives? We answer these questions through reading about concrete ethnographic examples from a wide array of global contexts and watching documentaries about media activism and experiences from Iran to Ghana to Venezuela to the United States and beyond.