Certificate of Achievement
has completed the following course:
Why We Post: the Anthropology of Social Media
UCL (University College London)
This course followed nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months in different fieldsites across the world. The researchers were active in the course, sharing their findings and insights and introduced some of their informants. Learners discussed a new definition of social media, concentrating on the content posted, not just the capabilities of platforms and the impact of social media on our lives including communication, politics, education, gender, commerce, class, privacy and aspirations.
5 weeks, 3 hours per week
Daniel Miller
Professor of Anthropology
UCL (University College London)
Transcript
Learning outcomes
- Explore the academic literature available on previous studies of social media
- Develop (or confirm) an introductory understanding of anthropology
- Be introduced to, and identify, ethnography as a research methodology
- Define and discuss a new definition of social media 'scalable sociality'
- Compare and contrast between content posted on social media and platform capabilities
- Recognise the importance of visual images in human communication
- Identify within social media the influence on politics, gender, communication and equality
- Compare the researcher's discoveries to the learner's own social media activity
- Investigate, collate and produce contributions to discussions on learner's own use of social media
Syllabus
- What definition can we give to social media?
- What is an anthropological approach to social media?
- The rise of visual images in human communication.
- Social media and its consequence for privacy.
- Is social media a form of education or a distraction from education?
- How is social media used in small scale commerce?
- What difference does social media make to politics?
- What is the impact of social media on gender?
- How does social media impact upon inequality both offline and online?
- What do we learn from a region such as China that uses entirely different social media platforms?
- Does social media unify the world or mainly express prior cultural diversity?
Issued on 2nd July 2016
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