MA Digital Media, Culture and Society

For entry in the academic year beginning September 2027, the tuition fees are as follows:

• MA (full-time)
  UK students (per annum): £15,400
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £34,800

The fees quoted above are fully inclusive of tuition, administration and computational costs.

Fees for entry are subject to yearly review. The University reserves the right to increase your tuition fee by up to 7% each year for courses lasting more than one year, including to reflect rising costs associated with delivering our educational and wider student experience. Postgraduate fees information .

Always contact the admissions team if you are unsure which fee applies to your qualification award and method of attendance.

International Student Course Deposit

International applicants will be required to pay a course deposit of £2,500 to secure their place on the programme. Full details of how and when to make this payment will be included in your offer letter. This deposit confirms your intention to study in the UK and replaces the need for a separate CAS deposit.

All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).

We know that student finance can be complicated. The links below provide further information to help guide you.

• Learn more about - student finance options for UK students.
• Learn more about - fees and finance for international students .
• Graduates of The University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University can receive a 10% discount on their master's degree tuition fees as part of our Manchester Alumni Loyalty Discount scheme.

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 Canvas.

· 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.