* Essay Question :
Consider how digital forms of communication shape human experiences such as friendship, leisure, work, love and conflict. Take one of the above and draw on theories to examine a specific form of digital culture, such as a website, a social networking site, a game or an app.

* About Lecture : Digital Cultures

The World Wide Web has become part of everyday life, but do we live in a networked digital age? This session explores how digital cultures have shaped our bodies and identities. For instance, are we more ‘connected’? Have new technologies destroyed social interaction? I draw on the work of Zygmunt Bauman to consider how digital cultures embody his term Liquid Modernity. Bauman calls for a rethink of life-politics, as we move from a solid hardware-focused modernity to a more fluid phase. In this lecture I ask how we cope with friendship, leisure, work, love and conflict in a networked digital age.
I consider the questions raised by technologies in art, debates on technological determinism, digital capitalism, gender and technology and disembodied warfare. New technologies have improved methods of state surveillance but recent events also show how they enable collective action. Do machines make us think differently? Does technology come ‘pre-coded’ with its own values? Do new technologies advance democracy or bind us in a networked global market system? In this session I explore a range of concepts and examples of digital culture, such as social networking, gaming, Internet shopping, digital fashion and contemporary art.
Key words: technology, connectivity, network, digital. Reading
Albrechtslund, Anders (2008) ‘Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance,’ First Monday 13:3. Available at URL: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2142/1949
Bauman, Z. (2000) ‘On Being Light and Liquid,’ Liquid Modernity Cambridge: Polity, pp. 1-15.
Benjamin, W. (1970) ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ [1936] in Illuminations. London: Random House, pp. 211-144.
Lupton, D. (2000) ‘The Embodied Computer/User’ in Bell, D. and Kennedy, B. (eds.) The Cybercultures Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, pp. 423-432.
Miller, V. (2011) Introduction to Understanding Digital Culture. London: Sage, p. 1-8. Murphie, A., Potts, J. (2003) ‘Art and Technology’ in Culture and Technology. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 39-65.