Ithaca College

TVR320: Topics in Media Technology: The Seduction and Surveillance of New Media (ICC WI and ICC DV) CRN30032, focuses on how new media (mobile, social, web, etc.) has led to some unanticipated outcomes that affect our personal life experience in both utopic and dystopic ways. We will also focus on how digital media has impacted the construction of individual and group identities, challenged inequality, and given a voice to people and populations that have been systematically marginalized.

The widespread use of new media has led to the transformation of privacy and the most comprehensive surveillance state that has ever existed. Yet, we are also able to use these new media tools to collaborate and communicate in remarkably positive ways never before possible, catalyzing an increased voice and social coordination tool for historically marginalized populations. We are currently experiencing the amazingly powerful ways that information technologies can keep us connected, communicating, working, and learning. Yet, the reliance on these communication technologies is also revealing amplified issues of privacy and corporate responsibility. Course topics include privacy and surveillance, community and collaboration, changing notions of time, effects on self and social relationships, copyright, governance, social justice, decentralized self-organization, and more. Course content is relevant to a wide variety of student interests, including the social and natural sciences, business and economics, legal issues, the humanities, etc.

Course work: discussing thought-provoking questions in the online forum, 2 interesting writing assignments that fulfill the ICC WI and DV, one of which focuses on your own media use, and the other is a topic that you are interested in related to new media and equality. 

All majors and academic levels are welcome to enroll in the Winter Session section of this course; students outside of the TVR and Emerging Media majors should use the normal course request process for appropriate overrides. The course will count for the ICC writing intensive (WI) and diversity (DV) requirement for all students, and will also count as a core class for TVR and Emerging Media majors.

Contact Dr. Rosen at drosen@ithaca.edu with any questions regarding course content or override information.