Note 1: all essays should draw substantially on the events, ideas and materials discussed on ARTS3091.
Note 2: we prefer on this course not to read essays that are fairly generally on “social media” (including Facebook etc) or “mobile phones”. Although we do discuss these in class, this course has other emphases.
Please choose one topic only on which to write your essay:
- What are some of the futures one could imagine for media and/or communications? From your engagement with the course, take one or two specific examples of emerging media and communications technologies and/or new understandings of what it is that media and communications do. Discuss where these examples might be taking both thinking about and working with media and communications within the next 5-10 years.
- How are media and communications changing the world? Choose one or two examples from your engagement with the course that are important with regard to changes within the broader world. You could, for example, choose from the changes involving: work and money, politics, relationships, social organisation, health, science or education. Discussing your chosen examples, consider how much of what is happening in these aspects of the world is now driven by events in media and communications. How much will be driven by them in the future? What difference will this make to the wider world? How will the changes in the areas you have chosen to discuss lead to changes beyond these areas?
- Consider media in an “expanded field”—media and communications thought/discovered far more broadly that we might have thought perhaps 20 or 30 years ago. How much is the entire world one of mediums for the ‘transmission of influences’ (as Alfred Whitehead wrote). Discussing one or two examples of some unusual understandings of where we might find media and communications, or what it is they might do. What are these examples teaching us about media and communications and, in the end, about the world, others, and perhaps ourselves?
- How does thinking about media and communications differently change what we do with and through them? Compare at least two different concepts of media and/or communications, drawn from your engagement with the course. How do these reflect different understandings of how the world (and we) work? Use your discussion of these examples to further discuss the changing relations between the way we think media and communications, the media and communications technologies and techniques we develop, and the way we move/change with the world in which we live?
Sample Solution
