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Digital Technology, Media and Society (P3062)

15 credits, Level 4

Autumn teaching

Digital media saturates everyday life, re-organises cultural productions of all kinds, and re-mediates the teaching and learning environments which you will inhabit at Sussex. The course aims to examine this digital environment through both practical and theoretical perspectives. It enables you to understand and use digital tools to enhance and explore your study and to take a critically informed stance on your existing practices.

The course examines developments in new media with a particular emphasis on different uses of digital media, enabling you to make distinctions between kinds of material, genres and platforms. Through a practical approach it equips you to use digital media confidently to both enhance study and to understand the digital environment as media and cultural form.

The course covers topics including data visualisation, searching for resources, citation, catalogues, mapping, archiving, using social media, privacy, copyright and surveillance, digital media as a research area (e.g. how to research and ethics of researching tweets / Wikipedia / social forums) and the politics of software.

The course will draw upon a range of digital research platforms, including those owned and/or subscribed to by the university in order to provide a solid foundation for you to embark on future independent research.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 22 hours of contact time and about 128 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2024/25. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.