AN138a-DIGITAL CULTURES

FALL 2022 - brandeis university . DESIGNED AND TAUGHT

What can digital technologies teach us about what it means to be human?  How do new media technologies impel us to rethink the dialectic relationships between: nature and culture, self and other, and virtual and real? How has the digital reconfigured power relations, status, and modes of influence? How do individuals represent themselves online and how does that re-shape their experiences and identities offline? What kinds of new opportunities and challenges does the digital offer the discipline of anthropology, impelling us to re-think how we conceptualize and conduct anthropological research? This course offers you the opportunity to delve into questions such as these at the intersection of human experience and new digital technologies.

We will explore this interface between people and the digital through a number of different perspectives and approaches. We will identify major issues, debates, and key concepts in the emerging field of digital anthropology such as: whether the digital is in fact a new phenomenon, if face-to-face encounters are more “immediate” than online meet-ups, and where the spatial and temporal boundaries of the digital world are located. From changing conceptions of space and place, the role of influencers on social media, to digital portraits, and the social labor of emojis, we will travel through digital worlds together to examine the rich cultural, political, economic, and ethical questions opened up by a renewed interest in digital technologies. Classes will combine interactive lectures, discussions, and workshops. Each class is keyed to a set of readings, and it is crucial that students keep up with the readings and be prepared to discuss them in class. Some lectures will directly engage our readings while others will provide contextualizing historical and theoretical information. We will routinely break into small groups for more concentrated discussion.

Beyond reading about, theorizing, discussing, and blogging about how digital technologies and human experience co-constitute one another, students will also get firsthand experience researching a digital phenomenon. This capstone digital autoethnography project involves original research on a topic related to one’s own experiences in a digital world as set in conversation with the theoretical debates, key concepts, and ethnographic material from the lectures and readings.