Mediated Subjectivity is a blog for a Eugene Lang | The New School course that engages with the nexus between politics, subjectivity and the networked public sphere. We meet every MW 1200-1:40 in Johnson/Kaplan 66 West 12th Room 602. The course is taught by Marco Deseriis.

Course Description
With their emphasis on constant sharing and updating, social network sites, blogging platforms, photo and video sharing services, are reshaping contemporary culture by providing virtually infinite opportunities for self-expression and conversation. While theorists such as Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, and Yochai Benkler celebrate the democratic potential embedded in online participatory culture, political scientists and philosophers such as Cass Sunstein, Slavoj Zizek and Jodi Dean maintain that the echo chamber effect of social media as well as the possibility of realizing one’s fantasies in digital environments have the unintended effect of obfuscating actual power structures and therefore our ability to act upon them. By addressing this bifurcation in contemporary theorizations of cyberculture, the course analyzes online participatory culture not only for its content but also as an extension of the media that enable it. In particular we will be asking what kind of forms of subjectivity are set in motion by media that demand users to provide constant responses, sharing, and updates. Further, students will have the opportunity to test these critical and theoretical problems by analyzing web-based phenomena such as online role-playing games, social network sites, blogs, viral videos, image boards, and news aggregators.

Course Objectives
Ideally, by the end of the semester all students will have acquired a critical perspective on the nexus between politics and subjectivity in the networked public sphere. Such perspective will be informed not only by readings, lectures, online and in-class conversations, but also by the students’ direct involvement in collaborative research projects.

Course Format
While the class meets twice a week in real life, the students and the instructor engage in an ongoing conversation on the Web through the blog Mediated Subjectivity (Url: https://mediasubjectivity.wordpress.com). Internet discussions and in-class conversations will be partly dedicated to the weekly readings and partly to the projects the students will advance individually and collectively throughout the semester. Further instructions will be provided by the instructor in class.

Assignments
Each week students are assigned materials such as articles, blog posts, book chapters, and videos revolving around a weekly theme. All students are required to read and watch these materials and be ready to discuss them in class. Further, before each class one or two students post a short summary online of the weekly readings (at least 48 hours before the beginning of class) and prepare to lead a class discussion on the weekly theme. Each student is required to present twice in the course of the semester. When students do not present, they have to post two comments to other students’ posts before the beginning of each class. One of the comments goes to the summary of readings and the other comment to the students’ projects.

The projects are meant to stimulate the students’ ability to think and act politically in the online public sphere. Students will conceive, design, execute and present a political project or campaign of their choice. Each project is divided in five phases: 1) ideation; 2) brainstorming and design; 3) execution; 4) outreach; 5) report and presentation. Of these five phases only the first one is performed individually. After the first two weeks, students will select 4-6 ideas from the pool of ideas that have been posted individually on the class blog (phase 1) and work on them collectively until completion through phase 5. This cycle is repeated twice. While in the first part of the semester students will be required to use conventional social media tools such Facebook groups, Twitter feeds, listservs, and blogs in the second phase they will experiment with more creative tools such as Internet memes, image boards, games, and viral videos.