[For complete information and downloads, check the Moodle site for this class.]
Introduction to New Media
HMCS 294-01, Fall 2009
Macalester College
Prof. John Kim
Tues/Thurs 3 - 4:30pm, HUM 402

In the last couple of decades we have seen the invention and popularization of a wide assortment of digital technologies and with them, a wide variety of new media forms. The internet (which includes a collection of media forms, from web pages and peer-to-peer software to social networking and video sharing sites), massively multiplayer online video games, ubiquitous computing, software, mobile phones – together, many argue, these and other forms of new media are reshaping how we live, create, work and, even, what it means to be human.

In this class we’ll examine a cross-section of contemporary humanistic research that has sought to understand the impact(s) of new media through a comparison to earlier, pre-digital media. In addition, we will engage in hands-on workshops, where we will use and learn some of the tools, software and websites that our texts consider. The organizational structure of the course is straightforward. Week-by-week we consider traditional media forms (Sound, Text, Image) then seek to understand the ways in which each has transformed, reshaped and hybridized with the advent of new media technologies.

By the end of the course, you should be able to critique and synthesize the ways in which others have characterized the impact of new media. You should have a sense of just what is and isn’t “new” about new media. And most important of all, you should have begun to build your own theories of how new media and the humanities interact.*

See full syllabus...

*Thanks to Fred Turner for some of the ideas for this syllabus.