Will Monroe shared two links with us this week.
The first is Mark Federman’s reply to danah boyd asking how to define work. He quotes from Understanding Media:
‘Work,’ however, does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. … In the computer age we are once more totally involved in our roles. In the electric age, the ‘job of work’ yields to dedication and commitment, as in the tribe.
The second resource is from the The Altantic and is titled Beyond McLuhan: Your New Media Studies Syllabus in which Christina Dunbar-Hester “walks [us] through her PhD-level class on technology and media. Along the way, she distills a quarter century of academic work that goes far beyond pop culture’s standard takes on how our world changes.”
In this course we ask, how can we think about media technologies in a smart and critical way? Do they “re-wire” society and drive social change, as is popularly (and ubiquitously) claimed? How do they reflect our social values and divisions? Is there anything special about media and information technologies in particular?
Do check out the reading list at the bottom of that post!
Understanding Media 