Digital Communications in Theory and Practice

My doctoral program has an innovative alternative to traditional comprehensive exams.  Instead of reading 80+ books and spending a few days filling blue-books with essays, we can choose to 1. Publish a paper to a peer-reviewed academic journal, 2. Present a paper at an academic conference, and 3. Develop a syllabus.

I just defended my comps and am now officially ABD (wahoo!).  I hope to trade in those letters for a different 3, but in the meantime, here is the work I submitted to complete my MPhil:

  • Jonah Bossewitch and Aram Sinnreich (July 23, 2012) The end of forgetting: Strategic agency beyond the panopticon New Media & Society 1461444812451565,doi:10.1177/1461444812451565 (proof)
  • Bossewitch, Jonah (2011)Pediatric Bipolar and the Media of MadnessNational Communications Association  11/09: Slides. Published in “Drugs and Media: New Perspectives On Communication Consumption and Consciousness”, eds. MacDougall, R. C., New York : Continuum: 2011. <website> (preprint)
  • Digital Communications in Theory and Practice, Fall 2013: Syllabus

The syllabus was alot of work, but was definitely fun to work on. It came out of a mentorship I  worked on last year for a friend who was enrolled in Prescott college. He’s an activist and a close friend who wanted to learn more about this internet stuff…  We got a few weeks in, and Occupy erupted. But, someday I’ll teach this from start to finish.


Digital Communications in Theory and Practice

Prof. Jonah Bossewitch

Office Hours: By appointment

Course syllabus

Description

Like the telegraph and the railroad in their time, the Internet has been heralded as the promoter of equality, freedom, and democracy. And like the technologies that preceded it, its impact will ultimately derive from the ways we choose to use it.

What strategies are individuals, communities, and organizations developing to manage flows of information, maintain relationships, and organize collective action on the internet? How can we communicate more intentionally and purposefully? How can we be more deliberate in our choices around media consumption and production?

This course will explore new media and communication in both theory and practice. We will attempt to contextualize and historicize the digital revolution though the lenses of social and cultural theory, architecture, popular culture, and a simultaneous immersion in cultures of use. We will study and encounter how software embedded in communities of practice traces the social fabric of the networked age. Our inquiry will be guided and informed by a hands-on immersion into the fields are studying.

Objectives

This course is designed to help you improve your critical judgment around media and communications platforms and practices. Through a combination of direct engagement and reflection, you will learn to make more informed ethical and aesthetic choices in your media and communications diet, and learn to better critique the hype around emerging technologies. You will feel confident critically engaging with mainstream Internet pundits and become more comfortable engaging in the jargon-filled discourse around new media.

By the end of the course you will have a greater understanding of what software is and how/why it is created, and you will have also gained experience with a variety of collaboration tools, such as issue trackers, wikis, blogs, tagging, and RSS. We will be working closely with the technologies we will be studying, in order to develop perspectives grounded in experience, and throughout the semester we will be helping each other connect theory to practice, and vice versa.

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