Digital Culture and Everyday Life (DIG504)

Focusing on the emerging online digital culture, the course asks how digital technologies are shaping everyday life at group level, as well as institutionally. We will explore the ways in which media and everyday life are intertwined, thereby tackling broader socio-political questions ranging from experiences of everyday space, time, and mobility via the impacts of digital media on self and identity to the broader environmental, infrastructural and social impacts of digital technologies.

The course will engage with some of the most exciting and pressing issues of our time such as digital activism, the cultural and creative economy, surveillance ethics and privacy on social media networks, as well as social wellbeing, identity, and stratification. Sociological theories are applied to analyse popular internet culture and its self-expression, relationships, and social practices in an emerging technological form.

By focusing on cultural and sociological impacts of digital media the course will look at institutions (i.e., family, governments, ministries), peoples (i.e., individuals) and groups (i.e., activists, environmentalists, companies).

It is expected that the students after completing the course will have the following knowledge, skills, and general competencies.

Knowledge

Upon completion of the course, students are expected to have acquired knowledge of:

• What digital culture and cyber culture means.
• The impact of the digital in everyday life.
• The new forms of public life - citizenship and surveillance.
• Network culture and traditional demographic factors (gender/race/class).

Skills

In this course, the students will obtain:

• Ability to discuss different perspectives on digital culture and everyday life, and demonstrate a range of analytical, critical, collaborative practice, and professional skills relevant to the digital culture and media sectors.
• Ability to work with diverse disciplinary and professional paradigms.
• Understand how cultural, social, and economic differences operate in digital environments.

General competencies

Upon completion of the course, the student can:

• Critically reflect on how advances in digital media shape our cultural, political, and social lives.
• Apply critical thinking and problem-solving skills, give presentations, and master data management.
• Design and implement a research plan.

Fagperson(er)

Study Adviser:

Study Program Director:

Course coordinator: