COM 473:About

This course focuses on reading, evaluating, and creating digital stories about contemporary women’s lives on the internet. From one perspective, women have a visible presence on the internet and regularly use digital forms of personal narrative to self document and shape identity. From another perspective, however, women are often objects of cultural narratives that attack femininity and women’s sexuality online. We’ll pursue a feminist analysis of creative production, power, and inequality to better understand intersections of gender, race, and sexuality and discuss the issues at stake in participating in a digital public sphere. From selfies to memes to social media, online communication can perpetuate gendered identities and violent interactions, even as those same technologies help women curate their interests and strengthen their networks of support.

Course goals:

• Understand the roots of Web 2.0 and how internet culture not only gives rise to communities of support and creativity, but also reconstitutes social problems and inequality.
• Develop a vocabulary to discuss systemic bias and silencing of people based on their gender, race, ethnicity, age, and other facets of identity.
• Recognize the complexity and plasticity of identity, and learn practices of shaping self identity online.
• Learn how to use digital media to preserve women’s experiences and knowledge.
• Study, critique, and reimagine the future of social networks and online discourse based on feminist activism and research.

Credits for ideas and inspiration that made this course stronger: Miriam Posner's "Selfies, Snapchat, and Cyberbullies" course, Tressie McMillan Cottom's "Inequality and Technology" course, and R.Y. Lee's "Gender and Online Engagement" course