This course is not a survey course -  it will not tell you one sweeping narrative that covers a historical, aesthetic, or cultural terrain. Instead, in Introduction to Digital Studies you will examine the contradictory claims made around new technologies, the history of digital media, the formal qualities of emerging technologies, and the ways that identity, community, and bodies are understood as everything from legal entities to social actors in relation to the digital. Since this course is being taught in a moment of extreme reliance upon digital technologies, I hope you share my understanding that, in 2022, the digital touches so many parts of human existence and our planetary realm.

We exist in digital identities - in our bank accounts, our social media entertainment, our photographs and videos, our data. Yet we still must cope with the fragility of human bodies. We engage with and pay for new media forms all the time, while also inventing new ways to use media and make it our own. Images, distributed digitality, tell stories that become viral. Communities form, shift, ebb online at a great pace. Industries emerge to tap our desire to stream content, play online, and make life more convenient. But, of course, none of this is distributed fairly or evenly. How can we understand all of this so we become smarter, better citizens and users of digital media?