Università Roma Tre

Dominance has never been achieved solely through the recognition and display of superior technological or military might. Knowledge is power, and it exercises its influence, as Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci put it, in the field of cultural hegemony, establishing the boundaries of what knowledge is and is not. Information, education and cultural and scientific production form the deep level of geopolitical interaction. Now, for the first time in history, this complex set of ideologies, practices and interchange has converged into a unified medium of production, access and diffusion: the web and its tools. From Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013 to the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal in 2018, from the pandemic to the contemporary war on fake news, the web and its sister technologies have become the ground on which to exercise control over politics and health, train new generations, disseminate scientific results, influence economic choices and challenge social norms. The cultural, aesthetic, social, juridical, economic and other structures that characterized the history of humanity up to the early years of the 21st century have been swept away by a new subject-object: the empire of the platforms.
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to these issues, trying to develop a critical awareness of the use of digital tools and to stimulate active participation in the revolutionary processes we are experiencing today.

Our main working tool will be the volume by Mario Ricciardi, "Communico. Linguaggi, immagini, algoritmi" (Rome, TAB Edizioni, 2021). Students will have to write weekly responses on the assigned readings and engage in both online and offline discussions guided by the instructor.

Students who will not able to come to class can still take the final exam, but are required to study the volume by Nick Couldry, Sociologia dei nuovi media. Teoria sociale e pratiche mediali digitali, Milano-Torino, Pearson, 2015 (English edition available).
They will have also to choose one volume from the following list (please note that the colloquium on the texts will be in Italian!):

1) Shoshana Zuboff (2019), Il capitalismo della sorveglianza. Il futuro dell'umanità nell'era dei nuovi poteri, Roma, LUISS.
2) Gabriele Balbi e Paolo Magaudda (2014), Storia dei media digitali. Rivoluzioni e continuità. Roma-Bari, Laterza.
3) Sergio Bellucci (2019), L'industria dei sensi. Roma, Harpo.
4) Teresa Numerico (2021), Big data e algoritmi. Prospettive critiche. Roma, Carocci.
5) Guillame Pitron (2019), La guerra dei metalli rari. Il lato oscuro della transizione digitale. Roma, LUISS.


Some of these texts (for example 1) are available also in English.
For more information please contact the instructor.