This colloquium is for students enrolled in the interdisciplinary Master's major programme Digital Society.
- Teacher: David Manuel Bozzini
- Teacher: Anna Jobin
This seminar provides you with an introduction to a range of methodological skills required to successfully engage with the Digital Society programme and be adequately prepared for specific case studies in the module.
- Teacher: Anna Jobin
- Teacher: Loïc Riom
An introduction to digital methods for the study of digitally mediated social phenomena. This course explores two major methodological traditions – controversy mapping and the ethnography of digital activities – equipping students with both quantitative and qualitative approaches to digital research. Students learn how to collect, visualize, and interpret data from web sources, as well as how to conduct qualitative, problem-oriented analyses of digital practices. The course combines theoretical grounding with hands-on exercises, culminating in group poster projects where students apply course methods to real-world issues.
- Teacher: Florian Jaton
- Teacher: Florian Jaton
Designed in a lecture series format, this interdisciplinary introduction presents various issues and areas of research in digital society and culture. What are the major contemporary challenges in terms of changes in the economy, politics, culture, and society as a whole? Who are the major players and their roles, what are the stakes?
The lecture series features contributors from Fribourg University and external experts.
- Teacher: Anna Jobin
Context
The digital technologies effect a fundamental change in our society, including its law. Not only does the law have to provide new answers to the arising questions (e.g how to protect personal data? What limits are there to the governmental use of face-recognition? How to enable a sustainable digital economy?) but more generally, it has to contribute to a digital order that on the one hand lets us reap the benefits of the new technologies while on the other hand protecting the individuals as well as society as a whole from negative consequences of the spread of these technologies. The challenges are manyfold, and we are currently still at the very beginning of a legal digital order – the shape of which is at the moment not yet clear.
Objective
In order to understand the challenges that the law faces, we first have to have an understanding of the functions that the law fulfils in society and the mechanisms through which the law accomplishes these functions (I). This will provide the foundation of the second part (II), where we will be addressing some of the specific aims that the law on digital phenomena pursues, such as the protection of individuals and the society but also the regulation of AI and the digital economy. This will then allow us to shift the perspective and assess current and new legal mechanisms. By doing this, we will be able to trace the evolution of the law as it adapts to the digital society (III). Throughout the course, we will apply the gained understanding on simple cases and study current relevant examples from real life.
- Teacher: Mark Drenhaus
Introduction to the main theoretical and analytical perspectives and approaches in social studies of technology with special emphasis on their interdisciplinary dimensions.
- Teacher: Anna Jobin
This lecture examines the history of digital technologies to highlight the social and cultural orders producing them. We explore various assemblages and configurations of social groups with digital technologies starting with the early history of computing, the emergence of computer networks and the Internet, the sociocultural and gendered organization of digital labor, the politics of platfomization and datafication and the governance and management of cybersecurity but we explore also parallel histories, delving for instance in countercultures and hacking collectives, in non-Western perspectives on computing or in the reassessment of digital technologies in the anthropocene. The lecture is built around an interdisciplinary body of research in anthropology, sociology, history, gender studies, computer science and STS.
The main objective of this lecture is to build students’ awareness of the social and the cultural dimensions of digital technologies in their historical trajectories. It shows how the social is reconfigured by and embedded in those technologies. Based on case studies, it also examines various theories on innovation, technology, power, culture and infrastructure.
Students are expected to actively participate in the classroom discussions, read excerpts of key texts and contribute creatively towards the end of the semester to the lecture’s archive of “the computer/internet trivia and odd stories”.
Requirements:
Grade will be based on:
- Participation to class discussion and class preparation (20%)
- Contribution to the lecture’s archive (20%)
- Written essay exam (60%)
- Teacher: David Manuel Bozzini