Media, Digitalisation and the City (level 6)

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Dr Scott Rodgers (subject to change)
• Assessment: ten examples of urban media, each documented with images, video and/or sound, and critically analysed in 300 words (45%) and a 2500-word essay (45%)

In this module we explore the interconnections between media, digital culture and urban life.

Beginning with a media tour of London's West End, you will be encouraged throughout the module to re-examine media through the city, and the city through media. City living compels us to use, desire and depend on a huge range of media content, devices and infrastructures. Meanwhile, media forms and digital technologies appear to us through everyday urban life, and are literally built into urban spaces: buildings, structures, walls, streetscapes and furniture, transport infrastructure, not to mention buried below ground.

The city provides a unique lens to critically study, understand and define media and the digital; and at the same time, media and digital culture are crucial lenses to understand cities around the world, including London.

The module is explicitly designed to be a meeting point for students from different disciplines, as well as between final-year undergraduates and Master’s students, to explore these themes across the past, present and possible future.

Indicative syllabus

• Key concepts: space, place, publicness and creativity
• Urban print cultures
• Cinema, television and the (sub)urban
• The urban soundtrack
• Media architectures
• Graffiti and urban street art  
• The urban brandscape
• The digitisation of location 
• Platform urbanism
• The sentient city