Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, a 5% penalty (of the total possible mark) will be applied each day a written assessment is not submitted, up until the 7th day (including weekends). After the 7th day, a mark of ‘0’ (zero) will be awarded even if the assessment is submitted. Submission time for all written assessments is set at 11.55pm. A 1-hour grace period is provided to students who experience a technical issue. This late penalty will apply to written reports and recordings only. Late submission of time sensitive tasks (such as tests/exams, performance assessments/presentations, scheduled practical assessments/labs will be addressed by the unit convenor in a Special consideration application.

CLASS DESCRIPTION: SEEING SOCIAL MEDIA

This is a class devoted to social media culture: the personal, social, political and economic ramifications of living in a time dominated by social media. As you might expect from our class title, we will spend a substantial amount of time thinking about life online in terms of networked images.

This can put us in contentious territory. If it is true that the internet is a trash fire, networked images provide a fair amount of its garbage, and most of its gasoline. Be they 'stupid' reaction GIFs, 'narcissistic' selfies, 'confusing' memes, 'serious' displays of evidence (as in photographed protests) or 'horrifying' displays of depravity (as in live-streamed executions), networked images tend to figure heavily into debates about what social media 'has done' to notions of identity, community, creativity, privacy, news, ethics, and pleasure around the world.

In this class, we will consider some of these debates, but we will also consider how the hyper-visibility of digital images contrasts with the opaqueness and transparency of platforms, apps, and technologies. This matters, because at the platform level, social media includes nearly every site or app we access each day. Everyone knows social networking services like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat "count" as social media. But we should also be thinking in terms of knowledge-building platforms like Wikipedia, shopping platforms like Amazon, travel platforms like TripAdvisor, streaming platforms like Spotify, Netflix , and Twitch, fitness platforms like FitBit, plagiarism detection platforms like TurnitIn, gaming platforms like XBox Live, baby monitoring platforms....the list goes on.

We should also be aware that even platforms that aren't explicitly social can be driven by technologies that create socially networked effects. We've probably all heard of algorithmic manipulation on social networking sites like Facebook with "personally designed news feeds," but the most notorious company deploying algorithmic "recipes" to sort, rank and target its users is actually Google. Companies like Uber that gather our geographical data are also key players in the tracing and tracking game. Even if you never go online at all, your phone is already designed to work like a drone, collecting and reporting your movement patterns back to the companies that built them (and sometimes to the governments where they are located.)

The class will take up these issues, framing them in terms of what can be seen, known, enforced, and resisted in social media culture. Throughout, we'll continue to return to the question: What are the best ways to learn, advocate, create, love and protect ourselves in social media culture, when both visibility and invisibility offer promise and threat?

LECTURE, TUTORIAL, OFFICE MEETING FORMATS  

• ALL LECTURES WILL BE DELIVERED VIA PRE-RECORDED VIDEO (ACCESSIBLE ON ECHO360)
• TUTORIALS WILL BE DELIVERED EITHER ON CAMPUS, OR VIA ZOOM (DEPENDING ON WHICH SECTION STUDENT REGISTERED) 
• OFFICE HOURS WILL BE DELIVERED VIA ZOOM, ONCE WEEKLY, AND ARE RUN IN A GROUP SETTING.

FIRST CLASSES 

• FIRST MANDATORY LECTURE:  WEEK 1 (Students will watch MANDATORY assigned videos on their own) 
• FIRST IN-CLASS TUTORIAL : WEEK 2 (Students will attend on campus, or over Zoom, per their registration details.) 

FULL SCHEDULE OF PLANNED UNIT CONTENT, BY WEEK 

Full Schedule of lectures, tutorials and assessments can be seen here:

https://z9bcp7k.sharing.bublup.com/ui/landing_page?item_id=001-i-49ba3caa-0c1f-4d13-a51c-3e29c250f3ea​​​​​​​  

POLICY RE ATTENDANCE 

Your attendance at tutorials is EXPECTED, but NOT GRADED. Additional IMPORTANT NOTE: If you miss a tutorial: Instructors cannot "catch you up" for this unit--you must do that on your own! To do that: watch that week's tutorial video (will be posted each week to Echo360) and complete that week's tutorial worksheet (also available on Echo 360) to stay current with the unit. Please bring your questions to your next tutorial session, or if you need faster answers, attend Terri's weekly Zoom office hour sessions.   

POLICY RE PRIVATE MEETINGS  

 This class is exceptionally large for a Level 3 unit, and the only personal meetings we can have with students are those relating to personal issues: illness, disability accomodations, domestic hardship issues, foreign student difficulty accessing materials, etc. Students desiring to "have a quick personal chat" about their assessment ideas will be directed to raise their issues during tutorial time (that is why it exists) or to bring them to Terri's group office hour session.  Please note that office hours for this unit are held once weekly in group format over Zoom,  where we will work on issues as a cohort. This is because there really are no assessment-related questions that so unique and personal that the everyone wouldn't benefit from working through them as a group.