Course

Description: Foundations of American Cyber-Cultures

How do new media reinforce pre-existing social hierarchies and also offer possibilities for the transcendence of those very categories? Our course offers students an opportunity to think critically about, and engage in creative experiments in, the complex interactions between new media and perceptions and performances of embodiment, agency, citizenship, collective action, individual identity, time and spatiality. We pay particular attention to the categories of personhood that make up the UC Berkeley American Cultures requirements of race and ethnicity, as well as to gender, nationality, and disability.

New media—media which are defined through programs and structures rather than content—can be yet another means for dividing and disenfranchising and can be the conduit of violence and transnational dominance.

At the same time, new media have already begun to offer exciting creative, subversive, informational and organizational forms that liberate in beautiful and unexpected ways. We aim to explore both these strands as well as the surprising links between them.

Taught by a practitioner of creative media exploration and critical technical practice, the course capitalizes on the rapid deployment potential of new media, especially online media. Rapid deployment of new media content allows students to engage in mediated self-representation. Studying their peer's mediated performances as well as source texts, students analyze their own experiences as both content providers and consumers. Social networks emerging from these mediated performances serve as proving grounds for theories of mind and machine, embodiment, multiplicity of personal and collective identities, morphing among stereotypes, hybridization, privacy issues, and finally the digital divide.

We contextualize these media experiments with weekly assignments that address non-mediated, direct, concrete human experiences. These direct experiences connect the perceived fluidity of online identities with the troubling interactions between technology, race, and gender and allow students to investigate their own ethical and political multiplicity.

Course Structure and Expectations

Reading and movies

The following book is required. You can purchase them online, at the Cal Student Store, at Ned's on Bancroft and online. The exact pages to be read for each class can be found on the schedule of classes:

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort, eds., 2003. The New Media Reader. MIT Press.

Reading should be completed by the lecture on the date for which it is assigned. All readings can be found in one of the four required texts or online (url and/or links to online readings will be available on the class web site). In addition to movie excerpts to be shown in class, you are encouraged to use the Media Resources Center in Moffitt Library.

Accessing the CourseWeb and Main Class Website

You can access CourseWeb through the Online Schedule of Classes (http://schedule.berkeley.edu). The main class web site, on which you will find all the class information is http://art.berkeley.edu/coursework/niemeyer/courses/23ac

Syllabus

This syllabus is posted on the class website and it contains the four kinds of information that will be essential for the smooth running of this class. These are:

1. The list of lecture topics
2. The locations and purpose of tutorial and discussion sections
3. The required readings
4. The assignments and their due dates.

Assignment mechanics

There are three assignments in this course, described below. Each one has five steps and each step is worth 5% of the final grade. The date that each step is due is listed on the schedule of classes below. Late assignments will not be considered and will result in your forfeiting that portion of the grade. The skills needed for the assignments will be taught in lab section or lecture. The format and other parameters of the assignments will be explained in class.

Course norms

Plagiarism will not be tolerated. As this is an American Cultures class, and issues of identity are central to the intellectual content of the course, respect and civility toward one another will be especially important.