A Chronology and Study of Being Online
dedicated to my chronically offline friends
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Course Description
I love being online. The web has been a place of refuge for me since I was a young, spending hours scrolling through comment sections, chasing link chains, and regularly making alterations to my online presentation of self. This syllabus is a collection of a few references that exemplify my love of the internet. I hope by traversing these links, you can gain a deeper understanding of being online and its impacts on our way of life.
Objectives
Before outlining the objectives of this course, lets first begin by identifying what are not objectives:
This course is not meant to:
Convince you to join a social media platform
Encourage you to think highly of platforms or their creators
This course is designed to
Help you explore social media histories, politics, theories, aesthetics, and critiques.
Encourage you to see social media and being online as a site for anthropologic and ethnographic inquiry
Schedule
Module One
The history of how we have existed online
These readings chronicle the birth and evolution of social media over time, focusing on how the larger socio-political-cultural context at each phase influenced how social media has developed over time. From early digital culture, the dot.com bubble, web-native culture, to open-source software, our technology histories play a significant role in how we relate to online spaces today.
--Readings--
Module Two
Relationship with/to/through the machine
These reading explore three major themes having to do with how social media technologies mediate the way that we live our lives. They broadly touch on how technologies impact our relationships with three element:
with each other
with ourselves
with the world (politics, culture, ideas of the role of technology etc)
--Readings--
Module Three
The future of the web
Dreaming about the future of the web and how we might exist online in more liberatory, safe, and comfortable ways is like my favorite thing to do. I definitely consider myself a techno-optimist which honestly when you read a lot about the evils of Big Tech it is hard to maintain. The following readings keep me excited about the future of the web and feel encouraged to take up space online.
--Readings--