FGSS 6676

Digital Asia

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2018-2019.

New media remain central to ongoing struggles over the constitution of the public sphere in Asia. In high measure, censorship affects the Internet and visual media (including digital, independent cinema), and government agencies are particularly wary of the viral qualities of new media. Extensive state investment into Internet control is offset by the fact that the Internet remains a primary site of political dissent and organizing. New media and communications technologies further continue to engender novel forms of political expression and notions of collectivity. In the past few years activists and artists as well as mass publics have thus forged distinct modes of expression in and around new media that, while frequently evading state prohibition, nevertheless present incisive political critique. The course will examine features unique to digital media—such as the viral, mimetic, archival, and amplificatory properties of the Internet—and ask how politicized media make use of these features to intervene into contexts of censorship and occlusion. We will draw on Asian media contexts also to interrogate assumptions about progressive politics. Investigating the logics of contemporary digital media in relation to the field of political expression, the course complicates received notions of non-Western political public spheres as illiberal, or lagging behind a stage of political development posited as normative.

When Offered Spring.

Comments Co-meets with ASIAN 3376/FGSS 3376.

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