This course serves primarily two purposes: it instills expository writing skills and it encourages students to think critically about digital technologies and the ways in which those technologies are changing our culture. These two purposes, though often complementary, are not always harmonious; in general, time spent in class discussing good essay writing is time not available for in-depth discussion of the subject matter. And writing-intensive homework assignments limit opportunities to assign significant readings. This course thus represents a compromise, offering students a good start at developing their writing skills and examining digital culture. The hope for this course is that students will continue these studies beyond the semester.
Digital technology and its cultural repercussions is the main subject matter for this class. This subject is approached through comparisons to pre-digital technologies or cultural habits. Thus the title, Becoming Digital, refers to the process by which digital technologies enter and shape the culture they belong to. The title of the course is also a subtle reference to a book, Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital. The different initial term in the title of the course is intended to signal a deliberately critical response as opposed to the celebratory and uncritical examination of digital culture in Negroponte's book. Criticism is warranted not only as one component of a wise caution regarding the effects of digital technologies but also as the most important quality of good expository writing.
The course is organized into four units, each culminating in a writing assignment. While the fourth assignment is intended to lighten the mood and the workload, the first three are progressively more challenging to the students, demanding successively longer essays and placing a greater burden on the student in developing her own ideas.
The first unit asks students to compare a traditional documentary photograph to a digitally-manipulated image. Both images challenge prevailing categories of gender. As the most pressing difference between traditional photography and digital imaging concerns the image's relationship to truth, the challenge to gender in each image relates in complex and subtle ways to the question of truth. Students are given a pair of readings that offer two perspectives on the growth of digital imaging: William Mitchell claims that digital imaging overturns the relationship in traditional photography between image and truth, while Lev Manovich explicitly opposes Mitchell, arguing that no such fixed relationship ever really existed and that therefore, digital imaging is not the revolutionary alteration that Mitchell claims it to be.
Given the two images and the two readings (supplemented by some additional readings), students are asked to write an essay that compares the two images, where the nature of the comparison is left up to the student. Despite the specificity of the assignment, students have a hard time finding a thesis for this essay; the difficulty is to discover an idea that both motivates an original reading of these two particular images while also offering some conclusions that extend beyond the particularity of the two images. Most drafts tend to make a claim like this: "These two images both challenge notions of gender but they do so somewhat differently." While this is an adequate beginning it is hardly an excellent thesis, for it must be made both more specific and more general. Additional specificity means making a more pointed claim than just "the images challenge notions of gender," and additional generality means showing how the comparison of the two images has repercussions beyond these images. For instance, the comparison between the images might demonstrate something about the technologies used to create the images or about the change in cultural responses to gender in the fifty years between the two images.
Unit Two presents students with a small library of journalistic writing on various ethical issues arising in the context of the Internet. Plagiarism, software and music piracy, underage pornography, data security, identity theft, and computer viruses are some of the topics available for student consideration. Students are also presented with some basic terms and theories of ethical analysis, such as the distinction between utilitarian and deontological ethics. (If time allows, these theories are taught through original texts in philosophy; if not, they are taught through secondary sources and class discussion.) The assignment asks students to choose a case for further study, and to write an essay that uses the case as an opportunity to consider the ways in which the Internet reshapes the territory of ethical conduct. A case might be a general behavior (piracy) or a particular instance of this behavior, depending on available evidence and the student's inclination.
The challenge of this assignment is once again to wrestle with the move from the particular to the general. Students are fairly keen to express their opinions about the ethical subject matter, and a pre-writing assignment invites them to lay their own beliefs out for readers. But the more successful essays will focus less on a defense of the student’s opinion about the case and more on the question of how the context of the Internet has heightened or intensified the issue.
Unit Three is the most open-ended assignment, asking students to choose some phenomenon relating to digital technology and discuss what this phenomenon tells us about culture. For example, what does podcasting reveal about modern Americans and their relationship to technology? Or how does the growth of the gaming industry shape social relations of gender, and what does this mean for future technologies? This is the only assignment for this class that asks students to do their own research, and even so research here is minimal. In particular, students are asked to find some "raw material" - unanalyzed evidence that can be subjected to a close reading - as a way of getting at their chosen phenomenon. Raw material for an essay on instant messaging might be transcripts of IM conversations or even the IM software itself. Raw materials for an essay on podcasting might be newspaper articles about it as well as actual podcasts. In addition, students are strongly encouraged to find some theoretical sources that can provide frameworks to help understand and analyze the phenomenon under study.
Supplemental readings for Unit Three do not so much offer material for student use as provide examples of the sorts of analyses that they might undertake. Readings cover music, entertainment, blogging, and other phenomena, showing the various ways in which these activities are symptoms of underlying aspects of culture. To ensure successful student essays, one emphasis in discussion is on the ways in which the readings use evidence; students too often fail to make good use of their "raw material," and end up writing essays that are somewhat too speculative and without sufficient intellectual friction. Returning to the evidence is the best way to avoid these problems.
The fourth unit asks students to write a review of a computer game. Readings include reviews but also analyses (literary, cultural) of computer games, in an attempt to show students the dimensions of a review beyond just "thumbs-up."
One of the chief goals of the course is to help students develop an effective process of writing. Many students arrive in college writing courses with almost no sense that there is a process for writing; they generally make an outline, fill it out with paragraphs, spell check, then print and submit. It is thus crucial to inculcate the notion that writing is a way to discover and develop ideas, rather than just a way of expressing thoughts already held. This course attempts to teach the value of the writing process primarily through the draft-revision format of the assignments, and also through a number of pre-writing assignments in each unit.
In order to provide students with the opportunity to experiment with their boldest and most far-reaching ideas, drafts are ungraded (though required). The disadvantage of this method is that some students simply don't bother to put any effort into the draft, essentially writing the entire paper for the revision. Most students however recognize the value of an opportunity for substantial commentary and evaluation prior to a graded submission, and they invest the draft at least with their initial ideas. Receiving significant critical commentary, students generally alter revisions dramatically, usually submitting a whole new essay and retaining only a few lines or an idea from the draft.
Comments are very extensive on both draft and revision. Comments tend to focus primarily on the value of the ideas, to encourage students to choose their most original and engaging ideas for further development and to be more critical of their own thoughts. Draft commentary may also correct problems of grammar, formatting, and other important formalities, while revision commentary will note such problems without focusing on them, unless they prohibit a clear access to the ideas.
Pre-writing assignments are designed to prepare students for writing the essay. Ideally, having completed the pre-writing assignments, students will discover that much of the essay itself has already been written. These assignments are also intended as opportunities for students to test the merits of ideas in an ungraded context, so that they may receive feedback and direction from the instructor. These assignments are often shared in class, and other similar writing exercises are sometimes performed in class.