MA Digital Media, Culture and Society

This unit probes the evolution of social media, platforms and apps in their cultural, social and economic implications. Students will discuss the transformation of firms like Alphabet, Apple, Amazon or Meta into platforms, businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation on which others operate, and will reflect on the implication of those transformations for a range of different issues such as surveillance and democracy. The unit will also bring to the forefront the questions of environmental costs of the rise of digital mega platforms and apps, their colonial legacies as well as the mechanisms of their internal and external regulations (especially, content moderation policies and internet governance and censorship). For the assessment, students will work individually to write a policy paper aimed at non-academic audience. The paper will be focused on a particular social, cultural or economic challenge raised by the processes of platformization and appification.

· To attract students interested in political economy of platforms and the importance of digital media design, interfaces and regulations for culture and society

· To provide space for developing solutions to the pressing challenges of a digitalized world

· To meet the requirements of potential employers seeking policy-related expertise in relation to social media, platforms and apps

First lectures will provide students with key information about the general aspects of the processes of platformization and appification as well as discuss these processes in relation to a range of particular cultural and social domains (e.g. arts, news, health, education and transport). In the following lectures, the focus will be on internal and external forms of regulations of digital media, especially content moderation policies and internet governance and censorship. In the final weeks, the unit will cover the importance of digital media design, governance and business models and their large-scale consequences, for example in relation to surveillance, democracy and climate change. Issues of colonial legacies reproduced in the processes of platformization and appification will be discuss across different lectures.  

The unit consists of 1h-long lectures and 2h-long seminars. During the lectures, students will be introduced to the key discussions about social media, platforms and apps, as detailed in the Syllabus section above. During the seminars, the first hour will be devoted to a range of diverse activities helping students to comprehend, apply and evaluate the knowledge gained during the lectures. The focus will be on identifying major challenges related to the platformization and appification of social media and suggesting solutions in response to the challenges. In the last hour of the seminars, students will employ a walkthrough method to analyse the design, governance and business models of particular platforms. The platforms for the analysis will be chosen by the students themselves with feedback provided by the unit teachers. All the relevant materials will be available on Blackboard.

· Compare and critically reflect on political economy of major social media platforms in relation to their design, governance and business models

· Analyse and evaluate the characteristics and consequences of the platformization and appification of particular domains of cultural and social life

· Identify major challenges related to the platformization and appification of digital media and review potential solutions to those challenges in an efficient and effective manner

· Map key problems related to the platformization and appification of digital media

· Plan and write a policy paper focused on a particular social, cultural or economic challenge raised by the processes of platformization and appification

· Retrieve, select, and evaluate information from a variety of sources, including academic literature, news articles and publicly available business data

· Analyse and critically reflect on cultural and social consequences of the design, governance and business models of social media and apps

· Work independently to summarise a complex problem and offer evidence-based solutions to the problem

Aouragh, M., & Chakravartty, P. (2016). Infrastructures of empire: Towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies. Media, Culture & Society, 38(4), 559-575.

Browne, S. (2015). Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press.

Crawford, K. (2021). The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.

Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media. Yale University Press.

Goggin, G. (2021). Apps: From Mobile Phones to Digital Lives. John Wiley & Sons.

Su, C., & Flew, T. (2021). The rise of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) and their role in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Global Media and Communication, 17(1), 67-86.

van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & De Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford University Press.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books.