AFR 202
Blackness 2.0: Race and New Technologies Spring 2010
Division II
Cross-listed AMST 202 / AFR 202
This is not the current course catalog

Media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman poses a number of important questions about new technologies: what will the new technology do, what will it undo? Who will be the winners and who will be the losers in any new technology? This course seeks to determine what people of color win and lose vis-à-vis new technologies. How can we conceptualize the role of race in, ostensibly, a utopian race-less environment? Is there more to new media and race than assumptions about a “digital divide”? Course materials include secondary literature and qualitative research to explore how the racial discourse of the “real world” is (or isn’t) reshaped and redefined in the virtual world. Topics for discussion include: defining the “new” in new technologies; reproduction and reproductive capacities; queer science/transscience; the politics of blogosphere; social networking and power; digital art; love Internet-style; designers, artists, and viewers; fandom; e-commerce and capitalism; gamers and the virtual world; and convergence cultures of television and radio on the Internet.