New Media Theory

This course aims to provide students with a fundamental understanding of the ways in which contemporary (often digital) technologies shape the lives of subjects today—and how those technologies often do so before one ever looks at a screen, hears an alert from a phone, or views an image.

Students taking this course will be trained in the most ‘cutting-edge’ theory emerging in the field: from theories of computation and machine learning to format theory, noise theory, statistical-architectural modeling, signalization, theories of camouflage, invisibility, and nonsensuousness.

The trajectory of this course follows a mode of double-deconstruction. (1) What we will study is not a body of literature that is timely or correct because it is ‘as new’ as the digital technologies it theorizes: students will be taught critical approaches to new media theory itself, analyzing the work of scholars and practitioners as they attempt to provide new language for emergent phenomena. (2) In developing language adequate to the contemporary moment, students will also be taught to use media-theoretical approaches in order to distinguish contemporary technologies, their long histories, and the enduring structural antagonisms that underly them.