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FIMS 9334 (Fall 2021)   Special Topic: Culture and Creative Labour in the Age of Digital Platforms  Cancelled

Course Description
The culture industries, creative work and culture itself have been transformed in complex ways by the current hegemony of digital platforms. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are all working to control, contain and monetize the production and distribution of creative expression and community formation, changing the very definitions and understanding of culture and creative work in the process.  From the institutional reconfiguring of legacy cultural industries like music and television, to the dominance of platform-specific cultural forms such as gaming and vlogging and the new creative worker subjectivities they have inaugurated, such as Instagram influencers, the ‘ordinariness’ of culture as defined by Raymond Williams – a society’s “common meanings and directions…shaped in arts and learning” – is becoming increasingly difficult to discern. Drawing from political economy, software studies and cultural studies, this course will provide a survey of the changes and continuities in cultural production and creative work in the age of digital platforms. What new forms of creative production and expression are facilitated and/or impeded by the structural logics of platforms? What new kinds of creative labour are emerging and what other forms are receding? What can culture mean when our individual tastes and proclivities are directed and determined in advance by hyper-personalized proprietary algorithms and artificial intelligence?  What implications do these developments have for personal identity, social connection and collective politics?

Course Syllabi for FIMS 9334 (Fall 2021)
The syllabi for this course is a PDF file that requires a FIMS account to view

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