NMCC Class Spotlight: Habitual New Media

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GoogleDataCenter-450x299Habitual New Media (COLT 607)

This term Professor Colin Koopman (Philosophy) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2014- 15 Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics) have been teaching the seminar course Habitual New Media in the Department of Comparative Literature. This is course is intended to provide graduate students from a range of disciplines with an introduction to, and deeper engagement with, some of the major theoretical approaches to new media as an object of critical inquiry. In this course students  survey emerging themes of inquiry gaining importance across a range of contemporary disciplinary formations including not only new media studies, but also science and technology studies, the history and philosophy of technology and science, and political philosophy and social theory.

Bonnie Sheehey (PhD candidate in Philosophy), and Professor Koopman, have both generously agreed to share their thoughts on the new media seminar from the perspectives of a student and as a teacher of the course (respectively).

Bonnie Sheehey

Bonnie Sheehey
PhD Candidate
Department of Philosophy

In COLT 607, “Habitual New Media,” professors Wendy Chun and Colin Koopman uniquely created a space for interdisciplinary inquiry into the ways in which new media invariably shape our present modes of habituation and the historical formation of our present selves. By weaving together a dynamic narrative through a critical engagement with theories of new media, the class was able to provide students from multiple disciplines with the opportunity to reflect on questions of temporality, sociality, and the possibility of political and ethical transformation in our networked spaces.

 The course nicely culminated in the interdisciplinary symposium “Living Data: Inhabiting New Media” by bringing together a set of scholars interested in the question of living data. The class was especially significant insofar as it afforded me the chance to engage and converse with students of diverse disciplinary backgrounds for whom the questions and concerns of new media are vital, live, and timely.

 

Colin Koopman

Colin Koopman
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy

The course has been a fantastic interdisciplinary learning experience for everyone involved.  From the start, the syllabus itself was interdisciplinary in that it combined the approaches of the two teachers: both Wendy Chun whose background is in literary and cultural studies (though as an undergrad she focused on computer hardware engineering) and my background in philosophy and theory (and though I didn’t study computers as an undergrad I was an early adopter of BBSs long before most of us used AOL to jump on the internet bandwagon).
An Interdisciplinary Approach:
A further interdisciplinary aspect of the course is the fact that it was offered in the Comparative Literature Department, thus pushing both of the professors outside of our normal expectations.  Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the students in the course have been very interdisciplinary.  We are split about 50-50 between media studies students (from the SOJC) and humanities studies (from literary fields and philosophy).  This has created a number of interesting sparks and provocations as we have together worked to translate vocabularies across disciplines as we interrogate the texts and debates under consideration in the course.
Key Concepts on Habitual New Media:
Some of the main concepts we have been focusing on include habits, conducts, and archives.  These have been methodological entry points for us in exploring the ‘new’ domains as ‘new media’ and ‘big data’.  My view is that information cultures and media ecologies are not only interesting in their own right, but they are also interesting sites for study because they challenge many of our inherited expectations about what is involved in seeking to understand critique these sites.  For instance, what familiar habits of ‘reading’ are challenged when the texts one is engaging in are encoded digital files?  What assumptions about ‘interpretation’ are disrupted when the texts one is reading refuse to sit still and present themselves as fixed and stable objects?  What scholarly premises are pushed around when it begins to become clear that the work of critical inquiry can no longer proceed solely on the basis of interpretation?  All of these questions are provoked by the very attempt to take seriously the presence of ‘media’ — a presence that is insisted upon by the attention we give to ‘new media’ even if these turn out to be indeed very ‘old media’ too.

Useful Resources from the Course:

Files, Cornelia Vismann

Probably my own favorite readings in the course have been my co-teacher Wendy Chun’s book “Habitual New Media” (but we read the manuscript for it, as the book is still to be published) (you can hear a lecture by Wendy Chun about Habitual New Media here)  and books coming out of German Media Archaeology, including Markus Krajewski’s “Paper Machines” and Cornelia Vismann’s “Files”.

To point to the latter, just because it may not be as familiar to people, the archaeologists of media offer a distinctive approach that emphasizes the technical, material, and practical side of familiar media objects like files.  Vismann’s book shows how files structure our lives (just think of the logic organizing your laptop), but in ways that are not so ‘new’ as ‘new media’ would have us believe.  Files have been with us for a long time as an organizational logic central to modern bureaucracies and even Roman law.  Her book is a fascinating exploration of the actual formats, forms, and formations upon which our informational culture has been premised with its reliance on files.

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