Order Description
You are advised to compile course notes every week from the readings and lectures, and these course notes can then be drawn on and properly written up for your Portfolio entries.
The Portfolio is intended to help you document and work through a range of key issues, ideas, concepts, arguments, case studies, and theoretical tools.
This assessment is NOT about simply providing summaries, and it is NOT about passively regurgitating content. If you wish, you may begin each entry by providing a quick overview of key points and concepts – but the main focus is on how you critically discuss and reflect on the central issues and theories. You are required to make relevant constructive conceptual connections with other weekly topics and materials in your entries.
If you wish, you can use the same format for each weekly entry as is outlined for your Discussion Paper; or, alternatively, you can choose to write three mini-essays.
Assessment Criteria:
• Writing and presentation: clarity and coherence of expression, grammar, punctuation, sentence construction, layout ?
• Conceptual understanding: ability to show a strong understanding of key issues, concepts, arguments across the course. ?
• Capacity for critical reflection: ability to coherently develop and articulate your own opinions and critical reflections ?
• Research depth: effective engagement with a sufficient range of scholarly research material and resources, to support your opinions and critical perspective ?
• Referencing: adherence to proper referencing conventions ?
Sample overview
WEEK 9 LECTURE / Week 10 Tutorial
Facebook, free labour, and informational capitalism Readings
Fuchs, Christian 2012 ‘The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook’, Television New Media 13(2), pp. 139–159
Hesmondhalgh, David, 2010, ‘User-generated content, free labour and the cultural industries’, Ephemera 10(3/4), pp. 267-284
Overview
This week, we ask: what’s the business model behind Facebook? Why should and how can we critically analyse the economic structures and the power relations of this hugely successful social media platform? To what extent have users (and their personal information) become commodities that are traded and sold to advertisers and corporations? Does Facebook (and other social media platforms) exploit our (free) digital labour to produce revenue?
We engage with Autonomist theories of free labour and immaterial labour, which attempt to develop a more rigorous conceptualisation of how new media technologies such as the Internet have led to a reshaping of media power.