Digital Discourse

Digital Discourse
Dr. Carmel Vaisman

 

A. Course description:

This is an introductory level course, engaging some of the key discourses concerning the digital culture we produce and inhabit. Are digital technologies making the world a better place or hindering humanity? Are we shaping technology or is it shaping us? We shall explore these broad questions through specific topics such as: language change between orality, literacy, and iconicity; digital identities between performance and self-branding; personal conversation over multiple public media; cooperation versus incivility in networked publics; private/public boundaries collapse; surveillance culture; participatory culture versus immaterial labor, etc.

 

B. Course requirements

Attendance. According to Tel Aviv University's general policy, if you missed 3 weeks out of the total (9), you cannot graduate the course. It will also be very difficult to follow the subjects and you will need to read the suggested reading as well, at the very least.

Readings. Students are expected to read the mandatory reading before each class. Since each week's class represents two lessons, there will be two mandatory items for each week. Occasionally, additional reading will be given for in-class workgroups and considered mandatory for the final paper. Suggested reading will be addressed in class and referred to in the final paper to the extent it was addressed in class. 

In-class participation. Students are expected to actively participate in discussions and small scale group assignments in class. These assignments involve additional unseen texts that build on and assume familiarity with mandatory texts for that class.

Midterm creative group project. Students will create a video/graphic project in groups that reflects some of the materials of the first lessons, to be uploaded online and presented in class after the Passover spring break.

Final paper. Students will submit a personal final paper of approximately 5 pages, applying the readings and course materials (save for the aspects related to the midterm project). The paper will be submitted via the course website on moodle.

 

C. Grading

Your grade in the course will be calculated as follows:

Perfect attendance and participation in class  10%

Midterm group project                                25%

Personal Final paper                                    65%

 

Course Schedule and Readings

 

Week 1

Part I: introduction to the theoretical framework of the course

Mandatory Reading: Fisher, D. R. and Wright, L. M. (2001), On Utopias and Dystopias: Toward an Understanding of the Discourse Surrounding the Internet. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 6.

Part II language and technology

Mandatory Reading: Deutsher, G. (2005). The Unfolding of Language: An evolutionary tour of mankind's greatest invention. UK: Arrow books. (Excerpts)

Suggested reading:

Baron, N. S. (2008). Always On:  Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford University Press. Chapter 8.

Peters, J. (1989). Satan and savior: Mass communication in progressive thought.

Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6: 247-263.

Shortis, T. (2007). 'Gr8 Txtpectations': The Creativity of Text spelling. English Drama Media 8.

 

Week 2

Language and technology: between orality and literacy; new literacies and the visual turn

Mandatory reading: Soffer, O. & Eshet-Alkalai, Y. (2009). Back to the future: An historical perspective on the pendulum-like changes in literacy. Minds and Machines: Journal for Artificial intelligence, Philosophy and Cognitive Science, 19: 47–59.

Mandatory reading: Dresner, E., & Herring, S. C. (2010). Functions of the non-verbal in CMC: Emoticons and illocutionary force. Communication Theory 20:249-268.

 

Suggested reading:

Baron, N. S. (2008). Always On:  Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford University Press. Chapter 9.

Barthes, R. (1975). The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill & Wang

Boyd, D. (2010). "Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications." In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (ed. Zizi Papacharissi), pp. 39-58.

Lankshear, C., and Knobel, M. (2007). Researching new literacies:

Web 2.0 practices and insider perspectives. E-Learning 4(3): 224-240.

Lebduska, L. (2014). “Emoji, Emoji, What for Art Thou?" Harlot, Vol. 12.

Soffer, O. (2010). "Silent Orality": Towards Conceptualization of the Digital Oral Features in CMC and SMS Texts. Communication Theory 20(4): 387-404.

 

Week 3

Networked Identity: from play & performance to context collapse & self-branding

Mandatory reading: Nakamura, L. (2014). Gender and Race Online. In Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing Our Lives, eds. Mark Graham and William H. Dutton. Oxford University Press.

Mandatory reading: Marwick, A. and boyd, d. (2011). "I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately": Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience. New Media & Society 13(1): 114-133.

 

Suggested reading:

Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday.

MacAulay, M. & Moldes, M. D. (2016) Queen don't compute: reading and casting shade on Facebook's real names policy, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33(1)-6-22.

Senft, T. (2012). “Microcelebrity and the Branded Self.” In: Blackwell Companion to New Media Dynamics. Eds. Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. Blackwell. pp 346-354.

Thurlow, C. (2013). Fakebook: Synthetic Media, Pseudo-sociality, and the Rhetorics of Web 2.0. In: Tannen, D. and, Trester, A. M. (Eds.). Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Vaisman, C.L. (2014) Beautiful script, cute spelling and glamorous words: Doing girlhood through language playfulness on Israeli blogs. Language & Communication 34: 69-80.

Vaisman, C. L. (2016). Pretty in Pink vs. Pretty in Black: Blogs as Gendered Avatars. Visual Communication 15 (3):293-315.

 

 

Week 4

Mediatized Conversation: are new media changing the nature and meaning of human communication?

Mandatory reading: Gershon, I. (2010). The Break-Up 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Cornell University Press. pp 1-15.

Mandatory reading: Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press. pp. 19-35.

 

Suggested reading:

Baron, N. (2014). Consequences of Connection: Loneliness, Reading, and Robots. Communication & Social Change 2 (1): 2-28.

Gill, M. (2013). Authentication and Nigerian Letters. In: Herring, S., Stein, D. and Virtanen, T. (Eds.). Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Pp. 411-436.

Hutchby, I. (2001) Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity. Chapter 8.

Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication 6(2) 181–201.

Peyton, T. (2014). Emotion to Action? In: Benski, T. and Fisher, E. (Eds.). Internet and Emotions, New York: Routledge. 113-128.

Tannen, D. (2013). "The medium is the metamessage: Conversational style in social media interaction." Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media. Ed. Tannen, Deborah & Anna Marie Trester. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Zelenkauskaite, A., & Herring, S. C. (2008). Television-mediated conversation: Coherence in Italian iTV SMS chat. Proceedings of the Forty-First Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-41). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.

 

Week 5

Integrative case study for midterm creative group assignment: internet memes

Mandatory reading: Huntington, H. E. (2016). Pepper Spray Cop and the American Dream: 
Using Synecdoche and Metaphor to Unlock Internet Memes’ Visual Political Rhetoric, ​Communication Studies 67(1):77-93.

Mandatory reading: Kendall, L. (2007). Colin Mochrie vs. Jesus H. Christ: Messages about masculinities and fame in online video conversations. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.

 

Suggested reading:

Davison, P. (2012). The Language of Internet Memes. In: Michael Mandiberg (ed.), The Social Media Reader. NYU Press. pp.120-135

Gal, N., Shifman, L. and Kampf, Z. (2015). “It Gets Better”: Internet memes and the construction of collective identity. New Media & Society, Published online January 27, 2015 1461444814568784.

Milner, M. R. (2013). Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. International Journal of Communication 7: 2357-2390.

Shifman L (2014) The cultural logic of photo-based genres. Journal of Visual Culture 13(3): 340–358.

 

Week 6

Part I - Midterm presentations

Part II – The virtual community ideal and reality

Mandatory reading: Turkle S. (1996). “Virtuality and its Discontents: Searching for Community in Cyberspace”, The American Prospect, 21: 50-57.

Reading for in-class assignment: Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior 7(3): 321-326.

 

Suggested reading:

Dibbell, J. (1993) "A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society."

In Peter Ludlow, ed., High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, 1996. pp. 375-396

Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. MIT Press.

 

Week 7

From virtual communities to social networks: sociality or labor?

Mandatory reading: John, N. A. (2013).  Sharing and Web 2.0: The emergence of a keyword. New Media & Society 15(2): 167-182.

Mandatory reading: Fisher, E. (2012). "How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? Audience Labour on Social Network Sites", tripleC 10(2): 171-183.

 

Suggested reading:

Benkler, Y. (2004). Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production. Yale Law Journal 114: 273.

Fuchs, Christian. ‘Dallas Smythe Today: The Audience Commodity, The Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory. Prolegomena to a Digital Labour Theory of Value’. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10, no. 2 (2012): 692-740.

Postigo, H. (2014). The socio-technical architecture of digital labor: Converting play into YouTube money, New Media & Society 18(2): 332-349.

Parks, M. R. (2010). "Social Network sites as virtual Communities". In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (ed. Zizi Papacharissi), pp. 105-123.

Scholz, T. (ed.) (2013). Digital Labor: the Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge.

Wellman, B. (2001). Physical place and cyber place: The rise of personalized networking. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25:227-252.

 

Week 8
From virtual communities to social networks: publicness weaponized – hacking, shaming, trolling etc.

Mandatory reading: Coleman, G. (2012). Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls: The Politics of Transgression and Spectacle. 
In: Michael Mandiberg (ed.), The Social Media Reader. NYU Press. pp. 99-119. 

Mandatory reading: Senft, T. (2014). Hating Habermas: On Exhibitionism, Shame & the Life on the Actually Existing Internet. 

​”Either/And: New Theories of Exhibitionism & Display. British Media Museum Books.

Reading for in class assignment: Phillips, W. (29/12/2015). We're The Reason We Can't Have Nice things on the Internet. Quartz.

 

Suggested reading:

Marwick, A. E. and boyd, d. (2014). 'It's just drama’: teen perspectives on conflict and aggression in a networked era, Journal of Youth Studies, 17(9): 1187-1204.

Ronson, J. (2015). So You've Been Publicly Shamed. Riverhead Books. pp. 75-81.

Shachaf, P. and Hara, N. (2010). Beyond Vandalism: Wikipedia Trolls. Journal of Information Science 36 (3): 357-370.

 

Week 9

50 shades of privacy and surveillance

Mandatory reading: Bennett, C. J. (2011). In Defense of Privacy: The concept and the regime. Surveillance & Society 8(4): 485-96.

Mandatory reading: Doyl, W. and Fraser, M. (2010). Facebook, surveillance and power. In: Wittkower, D. E. (Ed.), Facebook and Philosophy, Carus Publishing Company. pp. 215-230.

Suggested reading:

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. The University of Chicago Press. Chapter 2.

Bauman, Z. and Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Polity Press. Chapter 2.

Nissenbaum, H. (2011). "A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online," Daedalus 140 (4): 32-48.