The Mediated Self/Course description

Course metrics

 * Notional learning hours - TBD
 * Duration - TBD
 * Assessment - TBD
 * Credential: Bachelor of General Studies
 * Level: 2nd year Bachelor's

What’s it about?
Instagram, YouTube, infographics, selfies, Google Glass, drone photography, digital storytelling, Upworthy, data visualization, the quantified self, digital subjectivities. The popularity and pervasiveness of online visual communication and culture is uncontested. Alongside the rise of visuality online, however, come three key demands: first, we, need to assess the new terrain of the digital visual. In what ways are we using, embodying, producing, and sharing images online? What is the ontology of the digital visual? Second, as an audience, we require critical visual literacy skills to process, analyze, assess, and embody--in an informed way--the mediated images before us. And finally, we require cutting-edge skills to be both informed readers and savvy writers, producers, and directors of these visual images.

Students in this course will learn how cultural theory and visual culture theory apply to the way we present and are presented through media including TV, film, video autobiography like youtube videos, and photos and images distributed through social media.

What will I learn?

 * Acquire an overview of key theorists in the overlapping fields of visual culture, representation theory, social media/SNS theory, and subjectivity as applied to the humanities
 * Critically assess these theorists’ ideas
 * Explore a series of contemporary case studies related to the digital representation of the self online
 * Examine a series of theorists working at the forefront of these theoretical areas
 * Produce an online blog about one’s learning throughout the term of the course
 * Use social media for peer learning and support

What’s involved?

 * Video lectures by global scholars in the field of digital visual culture
 * Reflective discussion questions
 * Case studies

Prerequisites

 * Ability to read texts from the discipline of critical theory
 * Critical thinking skills