Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Baruch College, CUNY/Writing 2 - Digital Futures (Spring 2022)

In this course, the second semester required writing course at Baruch, you will develop your ability to read, write, and think critically. One of the most important abilities you’ll develop over the course of your studies (and hopefully throughout your life) is the ability to discern how the way we think is shaped by language and other semiotic codes such as sound and images. This course will ask that you think critically about the arguments of others and in turn develop and communicate your own ideas and arguments.

For the theme of this course, we will focus our attention on the established and emergent technologies that mediate communication at a distance, inflecting the ways in which we create meaning and share knowledge in the age of social distancing. We will therefore read, write, and think about the evolving discourse of new media technology by reflecting on our personal experiences with social media and networked communication. If indeed language makes worlds, then we’ll consider how digital mediums work to mold those worlds and give them shape, often in ways that are not obvious to our familiar eyes. Inundated by information and preciously dependent on new media technology to navigate our days, we will also address the possible futures currently at stake among the digital universe. In doing so, we will engage with a variety of discursive genres ranging from essay, poetry, and fiction to film, audio, and meme.

Such inquiry will lead us to ask difficult questions about the relationship of contemporary technology to the construction of the social self, prefiguring an array of discourse communities in which we find belonging and relationality on a daily basis. These conversations will ultimately converge on what it means to compose and communicate our thoughts through new media formats, and how in turn we can assume more control over our lives as digital citizens of the world.