Understanding New Media @ Hunter College

Slides

All slides are available in ppt format. If you do not own a copy of Microsoft Office for Windows you may use Open Office instead. For Mac OSX I recommend Neo Office. Both are free.

Class Readings (downloadable)

password needed for download

Class Readings (online elsewhere)

Adam Mathes: Folksonomies — Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata
Jean Baudrillard: Disneyworld Company
Daniel Chandler: Semiotics for Beginners
Dick Higgins: Synestheisa and the Intersenses: Intermedia
Paul Virilio: From Superman to Hyperactive Man
Shelly Turkle: Virtuality and Its Discontents

del.icio.us Extra Credit Assignment

You will need to sign up for an account with http://del.icio.us, the social bookmarking system(it's free). Read this. Find at least 5 new sites that relate to the class in subject matter. Tag those sites using del.icio.us and be sure to write a short description of the site in the "notes" box when you do. One of the tags you use on the found sites should be "UNM", this is so I can look at those sites tagged. Write a 1 page response to the Adam Mathes paper. Use your own experience to inform the paper.

Dreamhouse Extra Credit Assignment

For this extra credit assignment you will need to visit the Dreamhouse, an installation by the artist Lamonte Young. Directions are available here. Check first to make sure they are open before you go. After you visit write a 1 page response detailing your experience and whether or not you believe that the Dreamhouse is interactive. If so, why? If not, why not?

Final Research Paper

For the final paper you will write a close analysis of one technological artifact or event. The subject may be a website, the work of a new media artist, a particular new media technology, or some other object that falls within the purview of the class. The paper will not be evaluated on its breadth so the more narrow the focus the better. You should site at least five sources that were used in your research, two of which may be found in the reader and the remaining three elsewhere. The paper should be 9 pages in length. You will also be required to give a class presentation of your research around 6 minutes in length.

If you are having trouble generating a topic or difficulty developing a thesis statement you might look at the following sites for help.

Any topic that we discuss in class or that can be found in the New Media Reader can serve as a springboard for a larger research paper. This includes but is not limited to subjects such as:

Applicable Art or Artists
Participation and Interaction
The changing role of the user/audience(is it changing?)
Philosophical ideas on technology
Interactive Fiction
Hypertext
Gender and Technology
Education and New Media
The presentation/construction of self online
Democracy online
Online communities
Online communication
MMORPGs
MUDS
Social Sofware
Surveillance
Design
net.art
Prosthetics
"Virtuality"
Video Games

Obviously, the former categories are rather vague and a higher level of concentration will be needed for an adequate paper. Depth not Breadth!!!