See Schedule of Classes for current section offerings. Topics introduce new media and related issues.

TikTok has been downloaded over 2.6 billion times worldwide. Apps like TikTok shape culture while simultaneously being a product of it. Thus, it is the goal of this course to disentangle and deconstruct the multiple and overlapping relationships between the platform, markets, and governance with creators, consumers, communities, and content. We begin the course with a high-level view of platform studies and consider a variety of approaches for investigating TikTok and the ethical implications of these methodologies. Turning to TikTok’s algorithm, we will work to uncover how lines of obscure code have a very visible impact on the content we see, the information we consume, and the communities we create. We then shift to critical perspectives on identity and performance, knowledge-making and dissemination, creator visibility, and content moderation. We conclude the course with a discussion on what TikTok’s culture of remix and collaboration reveals about the politics of authorship within the new attention economy.

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