Theories of Media and Technology

This course is a part of Integrated Digital Media, a 4-course MicroMasters series from edX.

Students in this course will build critical, applicable knowledge and understanding of the pervasive impact of media and technology on culture. You will learn influential concepts of media and technology, and be able to apply these ideas to contemporary trends, issues, and your own practice of art and design. Whether you are a graphic designer, UX/UI designer, web designer, or accessibility designer, this course will help you connect your work immediately to a deep, evolving framework of ideas and questions that enrich our understanding of how people consume, create, and use media, how human and non-human objects are related, how games make us think about platforms and software, and how we currently view traditional media such as sound, pictures and video.

What you'll learn

• Contemporary issues and trends in how media is viewed and analyzed
• Ways in which theoreticians and practitioners approach media and technology
• A vocabulary that facilitates discussion of media concepts, theories, and projects from a critical perspective
• Critical applications of media theory and context to past, present, and future work
• Media-theoretical frameworks to objects, texts, and technologies
• The origins of media theory, and how these thinkers have influenced contemporary thought
• A brief look at ‘new’ modes of thought that expand on these earlier ones
• The thinking behind cybernetics, and the technological and social implications of this method of thinking
• The origins of computational thinking, how it relates to cybernetic systems, and what implications it has for media production and consumption
• How interaction and interfaces has led to new understanding of how people consume, create, and use media
• How interaction and interfaces has led to new understanding of how people consume, create, and use media
• The ways in which computational systems can be used as agents of control, implied and explicit
• How theorists understand the self embodied in the machine
• How ANT is not so much a theory as it is a method for understanding the world around us and the relationship between human and non-human objects
• The boundaries of our bodies in relation to the world of technology we have designed around us, what is permeable, what is fixed?
• How it’s possible to think about aspects of media through physical artifacts like infrastructure, software, and machines themselves
• How thinking about media has been transformed by, and in turn changed, queer and feminist theory
• How games provide a rich area for different kinds of media study such as platforms studies, software studies, and media archeology
• How theory has transformed our understanding of ‘traditional’ forms of media like video, sound, and still images
• Emerging theories surrounding media studies like Object Oriented Ontology and Post-digitalism