Texts:

1. "Remediation: Understanding New Media," Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, 1999.

2. "The Victorian Internet," Tom Standage, 1988.

3. "Neuromancer," William Gibson, 1984

Reading Packet is on reserve at the Reserve Desk, House Undergraduate Library

Additional articles (distributed in class)

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Course Description: This seminar focuses on understanding the relationships between intertextual media strategies and convergence of technologies and new media. For example, The X-Files was not just a TV series but also a movie, a series of novels, a comic book, card game, computer game, music CD, action figure toys, and unauthorized forms such as Internet based slash fiction. Such intertextual strategies and the new media they help produce and rely upon are important to study as they are repositioning how audiences understand the meanings of "entertainment" and "information" and even ethics. These intertextual strategies depend on a parallel rise in convergent communication technologies drawing together computers, media technologies and telecommunications. Moreover, convergence is not only about facilitating production and consumption of media artifacts. Convergence increasingly extends the range of corporate appropriations, transactions, and control even as it also allows "from the ground up" strategies. Therefore, because the interplay between media intertextuality and technological and corporate convergence speaks to issues of culture and new forms of capitalist organization, this seminar integrates history, cultural studies and political economy theories and study approaches.

Course Goals: The seminar is informed by media and cultural studies, history of science and technology, science and technology studies, political economy approaches, and, where practical, a hands- on engagement with the artifacts in question in the classroom setting. We will cover a lot of material -- looking at convergence it itself means that we will range widely over a number of areas that, of necessity, do not divide neatly into separate categories. The semester is organized into five units, each of which addresses aspects of intertextuality and convergence. My overarching goal is to help you develop critical thinking stills and to introduce you to major developments and current debates in media theory and convergence technologies as they apply to media artifacts. The seminar will also guide you through an analysis of contemporary corporate and media convergence strategies and activities that we will also look at as intertextual strategies; and it incorporates detailed case studies of some of the cultural artifacts noted above. This will enable you to adopt techniques of "reading" media texts and carry out research of your own as part of class requirements. In doing so, you are encouraged to develop your own positions on the merits of intertextuality in popular culture, the commodities it makes available, the media through which these commodities are operationalized and disseminated, and the social contexts within which they operate.

Course Objectives:

1. Learning to distinguish between the promises and the hype of intertextual strategies based on communication technologies.

2. Studying cases of intertextuality in popular culture in depth.

3. Exploring relationships between intertextuality and media technology.

4. Becoming more familiar with the notion of global media products and how this relates to intertextuality.

5. Gaining some hands-on experience using relevant information technologies.

6. Providing the opportunity to insert a critical distance between yourselves and the media which surround you in order to strengthen your status as critical thinkers.