Writing in Digital Environments

YouTube Channel for this Course is Here

Course Description

What does “celebrity” mean in the age of Instagram? How do you get attention online when there’s so much noise, and similarly, how do you make people forget something you’ve posted online when you want them to? In this course, we’ll talk about internet celebrity and digital personas, and examine a few big questions about social media, focusing specifically on virality, privacy and managing your own digital ethos. Over the course of the semester, we’ll look at some of the ways these platforms are used to design and/or manipulate identity, as well as to draw and engage an audience. In so doing, we’ll think about how we build digital identities, how we direct attention online, and why we trust these platforms and the people who use them with intimate representations of ourselves.

The course is organized in three units. In the first unit, we’ll look at how celebrity is curated on the internet: How do people cultivate or maintain their celebrity online? What are some of the strategies and tools they use to stay in the spotlight? In the second unit, we’ll look at what happens when celebrity goes wrong: Who are some people who have been ruined by social media, the internet and virality? What goes viral on a platform and why? In the final unit, we’ll talk about digital reputation management: How can you rehabilitate someone whose reputation has been ruined by social media? How can you ensure the safety of your own?

Objectives

Students will learn:

  • How to critically engage with and evaluate the social media platforms we use everyday.

  • About ethos, reputation management, and how to build and manage their own personal or professional “brand.”

  • About the ethics and politics of virality in regard to digital identity.

  • HTML and CSS basics, data visualization tools, screen-casting, video editing, photo editing, and beginning web design.

Major Assignments

Project 1 | ​​digital history of fame (web text)

In this unit, students will choose one celebrity to follow over the course of their (internet) career. They will get to know the person’s audience and the strategies they use to maintain that audience’s attention and gather new fans and followers. This unit will culminate in a final project that provides a history of this celebrity’s digital persona and their branding tools. This project will be written as a simple webtext HTML file, using images, and hyperlinks as appropriate.

Project 2 | ​​analysis of a social media disaster (video)

In this unit, students will track a case study of someone whose life was ruined by social media. This may be someone who was famous to begin with or who became famous through a particular incident. Students will research the story via multiple channels outside the original platform: library databases, news outlets, the Wayback Machine, Google search. The assignment will culminate in a short video essay (a screencast, a series of screenshots, or similar) that walks through the person or account’s social media history, and should discuss how this could have been prevented or speculate as to how the story might have turned out differently. What went wrong? Was it fixed, forgotten, or imprinted in social memory?

 

Project 3 | ​​personal branding project (website and/or social media platforms)

For the last few weeks of the semester, students will draw from lessons in internet celebrity (and disaster) to cultivate their own personal and professional ethos. They will do this by building LinkedIn and Twitter pages, or a Wordpress site, depending on their personal needs. In this unit, students will also learn how to curate their own Google results, and how to ensure their personal life is secure from potential employers or others who don’t need to see everything they have ever posted online. Students choosing the social media creation or curation option will need to write a brief report explaining their choices.