Our Digital Worlds (ARTS10003)

This subject provides an introduction to the study of digital culture and society. It asks about the social and cultural effects of the digital revolution – how has it changed the ways we interact, our sense of place and the ways knowledge and understanding are created and shared? How has access to the digital world reshaped social inequalities? How have the ways we work, love, organise our relationships changed? How do we assess the balance of new freedoms and opportunities for participation as against new risks and disadvantages? At a more personal level – how do people negotiate digital identities and relationships, and new relations of public and private, global and local? How does the abundance of data change the ways people understand society and themselves? How do we assess the ethics, sustainability and social/cultural effects of different infrastructures and platforms? In the subject we will read recent scholarship on these questions and introduce and analyse concepts and issues such as: data literacy, digital activism, the attention economy, human-computer interaction, digital ethics, digital ecologies and economies, digital divides, the digital city, algorithms and algorithmic bias, digital story-telling, digitising Indigenous cultural materials and principles of data sovereignty. Teaching of these issues will involve thinking about and working on specific instances – such as a website or platform design, a database or simple visualisation tool.