Digital Devices

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this course we'll explore how smart-phones, ereaders, tablets, and laptops have changed the ways we engage films, television series, books, music, museums, and videos. We'll focus on how the production of art and entertainment is now shaped by the omnipresence of devices which can function, at any given moment, as personal stereos, movie screens, bookstores, TV sets, cameras, or photo-archives. How does that media adjacency within the box impact the relationship between what used to be distinct media but are now transmediated endlessly, for fun and profit. How has curation - practiced by artists, conglomerates, and amateur fans -- become a supra-medium which subsumes watching, reading, listening, and taking pictures into one of the most widely practiced forms of popular entertainment in the twenty-first century? How do we sort out the complicated interplay between media technology, consumerism, and identity formation in those devices? Featured phenomena: Recommendation mania and the listverse, The Song of Achilles and BookTok, the photos in your smart-phone, Wes Anderson and Accidentally Wes Anderson, Lost Children Archive, Questlove, algorithm culture, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, COVID and the "Make Yourself a Masterpiece" craze, WandaVision, playlisting as a way of life (not just a list of songs), The Carters "Apeshit" video, JR's La Ferita...