A List of Possible Research Topics

To get you started, here’s a list of possible research topics for “Social Software and the Transcultural Mediasphere”. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I would appreciate your comments and suggestions:

• The migrant blogosphere - Migrants increasingly use blogs to stay in touch with each other, and with friends and relatives at home. Does the increased publicity of blogging enable migrants to overcome subalternity, or does it threaten to expose their precarious existence?
• Multiple voices - Chat and Voice-over-IP telephony have made it much easier to stay in touch with others over long distances. How does this affect migrant and diasporic communities?
• Diasporic networks - Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut and Friendster often strengthen local networks but they also support transcultural and transnational communities. How do these communities constitute themselves online, and what role do they play in community formation and maintenance?
• Moving images - Photo and video sharing sites like MySpace and Flickr have the potential to establish non-stereotypical representations of transnational communities but it seems doubtful that this is indeed the case. Which strategies of representation are at work in new media and how do they affect representations of ‘other’ cultures? And what is the status of cultural production vis-à-vis global media?
• Transnational gamespace - Massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft or Second Life create transnational communities, which seem to transcend ethnicity, class, and culture. At the same time, the backlash against ‘Chinese farming’ shows that ethnicity also informs discourses around fair play, intellectual property, and virtual territories.
• Across the border - GoogleMaps, Plazes, Dopplr, etc. create the illusion of a borderless transnational space, while movements through physical space are becoming increasingly more regulated. Which processes shape the hybrid, heterotopic space that emerges from the ‘mashup’ of real with virtual spaces? Is nomadism replaced by cyber-nomadism?

Social Software and the Transcultural Mediasphere

Recent innovations in communication technologies – often summarised under the label “Web 2.0” – have begun to change the relationship between broadcast media and media of personal communication. Newspapers, television channels, and radio stations are increasingly complemented by “citizen media” such as blogs, video and image sharing websites (Youtube, Flickr), and social networking platforms (Myspace, Facebook, Second Life). In the context of transcultural studies, this raises the question whether the concomitant transformation of the mediasphere results in a more differentiated perception of the relationship between Western and non-Western cultures.

This course will attempt to map the transcultural blogosphere, and it will try to shed some light on the role social software plays in the establishment and maintenance of diasporic, nomadic, or migrant communities. Furthermore, we will try to understand which forces shape the production, dissemination, and reception of transcultural media flows. Students are strongly encouraged to pursue their own research projects, and to develop their own methodologies. The course itself will be taught through different channels, therefore students are expected to develop their new media literacy through experimentation with different media.

Requirements: unbenoteter Schein: attendance of all course meetings/events and final exam; benoteter Schein: term paper.

Further details of the course will be announced shortly. Please sign up by email to julian@kuecklich.de