Although Blackboard is available to us, we’ll be using this course site for the majority of our course work. The rationale for using a blog as a course site is that technology and new media are among the “keywords” we’ll be using as critical lenses to study and understand media, culture, and identity. We’ll use the very technologies we’re seeking to understand and use as critical lenses, and we’ll examine this technology in light of the other keywords we’re studying. Questions we can and should start to ask about technologies like this course site include:
- How does this blog space contribute to, construct, or influence our own and others’ identities?
- In what way does this blog space represent (or not represent) an example of convergence?
- To what extent does agency reside in the human contributors to the site? To what extent might agency emerge from an assemblage of technological, data, and human actors?
- Can a space like this be gendered? What might a feminist approach to blogging look like?
- Can we consider technology as ethical?
CC licensed Flickr image: Keyboard by Jeroen Bennink