F1424 Culture of Digital Society (Cultural Heritage Sp. Track)
Levin Ilya
Digital technologies affect not only the everyday life, but all aspects of humans' existence - culture, safety, personal identity. It becomes increasingly important to recognise impact of the digital technologies on people as individuals, as well on societal repercussions.
In this course, emphasis will be placed on understanding the process of forming the Digital Society, from the very beginning of digitalisation up to creation of cyberspace and online subcultures. The course will also refer to a broad spectrum of phenomena and problems related to the Digital Society, such as: privacy, information management, identity, relationships, government interfaces, virtual worlds, and mass media.
Each student, upon completion of this course, should be able to recognise, understand and define the core cultural issues of the Digital Society.
Due to the broad scope of aspects and phenomena of the Digital Society, the students will be encouraged to creatively determine and pursue their individual areas of interest in the topic. Additionally, the students will gain working knowledge on the critical, key elements within the content selected by them for learning.
The format of the course will include lectures, home-works and participation of the students in discussions taking place both in the class and in the Web.
The course will focus on the cultural aspects of Digital Society. The students will be given a possibility to understand various cultural implications of Digital Technologies, by developing their analytical and methodological skills when studying various cases related to the digital culture.
The structure of the course is as follows.
The introductory part of the course defines the general concept of Culture and will refer to historical forms of culture, different cultural paradigms, evolution of the mankind culture. The introductory part will also address methodology of cultural studies.
Further in the course, the Digital Society will be determined as the end of Modernity, bringing a number of specific changes in various spheres of the human life: sociology, history, anthropology, ethics, etc.
The culture of the Digital Society will be presented using the Author's original model of a three-dimensional space defining three types of the Digital Culture: Social, Spiritual and Technological. Each of the above types of culture will be separately addressed in the course.
The course will also refer to new cultural phenomena respectively related to the three types of the Digital Culture, namely to social media, personal identity online, and big data.
The course will be concluded by discussing ways of evolution of the Digital Society. The concept of Digital Enlightenment - which is an expected future of the Digital Society – will be presented as an actual problem of the digital culture.
Evaluation
Readings