Topics in Digital Media – Fall 09

Next week we will start our first journal series. Please follow these instructions:

1. Watch Adam Curtis’s The Trap: What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom
2. Each choose one topic that stood out, intrigued, irritated, disturbed or made you tick in any way and try to discover the discourse around it through research and expand it through your own commentary.
3. Write at least one posts to the class blog before the end of Sunday. Make sure to include references and links where needed and to expose the discussion in an enticing post that would make the rest of the class interested enough to discuss it.
4. Choose at least three of the posts published by other students in the class and comment on them using the blog’s commenting interface.
5. Be prepared to present the posts you chose to react to next week to the class.
6. Additionally: Write a short comment to the Trap post about how do you see the relevancy of the trap to the new media discourse.

Required material:

• The death of the news / By Gary Kamiya
• Brooke, Clive and Ethan at Aspen / Brooke Gladstone, Clive Thompson and Ethan Zuckerman [from 'On The Media']
  
• Alison’s Summary
• Submit your comment to the text and panel and to the ideas expressed in Alison’s summary

Suggested Material:

• Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over / Jay Rosen

Alison:

• Read the two articles and listen to the On The Media segment
• Summarize it for us in a nicely accessible post to be published by Sunday 4pm
• Be prepared to present the article in class
• Post to del.icio.us some links that expand the discussion either about the text or about key themes in it.
• Enjoy.

See you all next week.