During the last two decades, several studies have argued with increased intensity for how digital media technology predict and control our behavior. In How We Think (2010), N. Kathrine Hayles establishes a framework for understanding the contemporary reciprocal relationship between technology and humans and argues that technology, even before AI, always have had an impact on the way humans think, read, write, and behave. Mark B. Hansen, in Feed-forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (2014) follows in the same threads by arguing how the media technology of the 21st century feeds us information even before we search, demand or even know that we might want it. More recently, Shoshana Zuboff has provided insights into digital technology as a global network of computational behavior modificators in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019).

These significant studies emphasize the need for questioning the role and function of personal computers, smartphones and -watches and reading tablets in our everyday life and culture, and for understanding the new (felt) communities that digital media facilitates.

In the course “Understanding Digital Media in the Age of AI, Codes, Networks, and New Communities”, we read and discuss a series of key texts that define pathways for thinking about media in the 21st century. Overall, the course will provide insights into how digital media function, and the impact they have on how we think, read, write, and behave. Throughout the course, the students will also identify and select their own material on which theoretical models might be used. Therefore, the seminar will be partly case-studies, based on cases chosen by student, and partly based on theoretical works. Central contemporary works will be discussed, applied to examples, and also discussed in relation to methodological approaches in the research and study of digital communication and culture.