RTVF 298 Syllabus • Fall 2021

@cartermoulton • mediaexperiences.slack.com • cartermoulton@u.northwestern.edu

Welcome to RTVF 298, Media Experiences & Digital Culture, and more specifically to our class publication. If you haven’t used Medium before, take some time to play with its features. The cool thing about Medium is that you can easily embed media, links, and images into your posts, as well as annotate any Medium page. This will be really useful for leaving feedback on the publications of your peers throughout the term. In fact, feel free to make comments or ask questions right on this (or any other) page.

Course Description

This course explores the relationships between space/place, experience, and digital media in today’s participatory culture. It invites students to make two critical moves.

First, through an introduction to concepts that theorize media culture in spatial terms, we will learn to think spatially about our digital media environment and participatory consumption. Through these concepts, students will be invited to analyze how media industries use spatial logics to design their media platforms, organize user experiences, encourage fan engagement, and protect their intellectual property.

Second, to think about how digital media technologies and logics are being mapped onto and transforming the physical spaces we find ourselves in. To make this connection, we’ll travel to a wide range of places where audiences are being actively called to “go out” and “have an experience” in branded media worlds. As we move across various sites of today’s “experience economy” — from movie theaters to theme parks, fan conventions, escape rooms, film tourism destinations, AR/VR experiences, pop-up themed restaurants, among others — we will interrogate a number of key tensions, including themes of inclusion vs. exclusion, industry power vs. fan power, ephemerality (experience) vs. archive (data collection), and play vs. labor.

Though our primary focus will be on place-based experiences built around popular media franchises, you’re encouraged to pursue topics that spark you. My hope is that you will leave the course not only with a critical toolkit for understanding your digital media consumption practices, but also with experience analyzing, designing, and advocating for particular kinds of media spaces in the world.

Course Materials & Costs

There is no required textbook for this course. We’ll read some news articles online, listen to some podcasts, and watch some things on Youtube. Readings and slides will be accessible as .pdfs via our Google Drive (see Slack for a link) at no additional cost. Should your research take you in this direction, you may want to rent a film, start a free trial of a service, or buy a ride pass or two on the CTA. These costs are of course optional.

Course Objectives

This course is intentionally designed so that you can explore what interests you. This means that the goals and objectives are flexible and by no means set in stone. New ones might emerge as we work our way throughout the course, and that’s fine! That said, here are a few things we’ll do together. We’ll…

• identify the key concepts, debates, and practices of both contemporary media convergence & media tourism.
• recognize how processes of digitization, conglomeration, & globalization affect the way media experiences are constructed for, marketed to, and enjoyed by contemporary audiences.
• discuss how questions of race, gender, class, and symbolic/economic power impact the relationship between media spaces and their audiences.
• apply & extend course concepts and debates to other aspects of culture and lived experience.
• reflect on our learning experience throughout the term.
• create collaborative multimodal projects, including podcasts, infographics, gifs, spatial analyses, & original place-based media experiences.

To this last point, I want to also highlight that we’ll be developing tangible media literacy skills that will our strengthen our ability to participate as citizens/users within a digital culture. Check out page 4 of this document for a list of those skills, but they include things like collective problem solving, transmedia navigation, improvisation and play, the ability to search and find things, and the capacity experiment and “remix” media content to create something new. We’ll be doing all those things!

Office Hours

I’m happy to meet with you virtually over Zoom on Wednesdays between 10am and 12pm. To meet, just head over to my Calendly and make a 30-minute appointment at least 30 minutes in advance. I’ve set this time aside for you, so don’t worry about bothering me. Also, don’t hesitate to sign up even if you want to talk about something “off topic,” or if you aren’t sure exactly what you want to touch base about. If that time doesn’t work for you or you’d like to meet in person, just DM me on Slack or talk to me and we can figure out a time together.

Our Classroom Spaces

Brave Space Agreement:

1. I agree to love, forgive, and take care of myself.
2. I agree to love others and build an inclusive, patient, trusting learning community where everyone feels supported and encouraged to take risks.
3. I agree to be accountable for both my intentions and impacts.
4. I agree to be thoughtful about my own positionality when choosing to actively listen or speak.
5. I agree to struggle against racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism, misogyny, shame, and other harmful systems.
6. I agree to be mindful of the harmful systems that I have internalized when they show up in my thoughts and behaviors.
7. I agree to handle conflicts with love and respect, and resolve them through facilitated dialogue.
8. I agree that my contributions bring value to this space, and to be open to what this space offers me, regardless of my familiarity with course topics.

University Hall 112: On Tuesdays and Thursdays we’ll meet face-to-face. Tuesdays will generally be a combination of lecture and group discussion, while Thursdays will consist of group activities, screenings, games, and work time for our class projects.

Medium: Medium is the primary platform we’ll use for publishing our work and giving feedback. During the first week of the term, you’ll need to set up a Medium account, complete your profile, and start writing.

Slack: Slack is where we’ll share news articles, talk about examples, post our own user-generated content, and group up for collaborative projects. You will also submit voice memos by direct messaging me on Slack. Create a Slack account and join our class workspace (mediaexperiences.slack.com) as early as possible. The mobile app is particularly handy.

The Internet: You’re invited and encouraged to use different kinds of apps and platforms to share your work this term; use ones you know, yes, but also use this course as a chance to learn new ones! For instance, one week you might choose to share your work as a Twitter thread, or edit and upload a video to Youtube, or post a short podcast to Soundcloud, or document an experience on TikTok, or create an infographic using Canva, or design a media space using Keynote, Adobe Illustrator, or a diner napkin. If there is a particular format you’d like to use to express your ideas but you’re not sure exactly how to do it, reach out to me and we’ll figure it out together.

#rtvf298: Since our conversations and content will be spreading across media platforms, please use the #rtvf298 hashtag no matter where or what you post so your peers can easily find and engage with your work.

a note about public-facing work: Because much of our work will be shared publicly on open platforms, I invite you to reflect on your own stance on privacy. If you want to remain anonymous on Medium, use a pseudonym. If you don’t want to include a photograph of yourself, upload an avatar to represents you. Think carefully about these choices, and feel free to reach out if you have concerns. We’ll discuss issues related to privacy extensively during this class.

The Work of the Course

WEEKLY INSIGHT MEMOS
Each week after completing the required readings and experiences, you should record an informal voice memo that clearly articulates one or two insights derived from the week’s materials. Those insights could include a key concept, the main argument, or a notable example brought up by the authors you read or heard from that week. These should be in your own words. Refer to specific ideas in the week’s materials, but paraphrase rather than quote directly. Some weeks you might want to add a reflection, question, or connection that you’re thinking about. Think of these memos as your first notes for the week—you’re summarizing the important aspects of the week’s materials in preparation for discussing in class. Submit your voice memo by DM’ing me in Slack by 11:59pm every Monday night (before I wake up on Tuesday, essentially). You can either upload the .mp3/.m4a directly into Slack or, preferably, create a Soundcloud account, upload it there, and share the private link with me. Always add the tag “#voices” to the body of your message. Only I will listen to these memos, and I’ll use them to help frame our class discussions. Alternatively, students who would prefer not to record memos have the option to submit 400-word written insights each week instead. Please let me know if you intend to go this route.

WEEKLY POSTS & ACTIVATIONS
Each week on the schedule in addition to the readings, there will be a number of exercises and projects—I’m calling them “activations”—to complete. Most often, it’ll be posting and responding to each other on Medium; other times, it’ll be sharing an example or having a conversation on our Slack channel, or grouping up with your peers to create an infographic or podcast episode. Just follow along on the schedule and you’ll be good!

MEDIA EXPERIENCES
What fun would a course on media experiences be if we didn’t host a few experiences ourselves! Throughout the term, we’ll be hosting “live” experiences as a class, including:

• Digital Escape Room, October 14
• Dune Premiere Screening, October 21
• Disney+ Muppets Haunted Mansion Watch-a-long, October 28
• VR Lab Screenings, November 8–12

Please join us. If you can’t attend the synchronous experiences, there will be other ways to participate asynchronously. We’ll discuss these closer to the date of the event.

FINAL PROJECT

YOUR PORTFOLIO
It’ll be sad to see you go, but the ticket out of this class is to revise your work and publish your final portfolio to our Slack #publishing-stream. The point here is to curate and present all the work you’ve done into one central “sticky” location that can easily “spread” via a single link. This link, in other words, should take me to a magical place where I can access all of your work for the term. It should include a landing page, four revised Medium publications, and your final project. Included on the “landing page” should be a 400-ish word statement that presents your portfolio to public visitors as one cohesive body of work and directs users on how to engage with your work. You might also use this space to reflect a bit about how the work presented connects with your learning trajectory this term and/or explain connections between your projects.

You can keep everything on Medium or present the portfolio on any other platform of your choosing (Squarespace? Google Sites? a Twitter thread that links to your projects? Linktree? etc.), but take some time to look over the feedback you’ve received over the term and make some revisions. As you revise, think about (1) your engagement with course concepts and materials and (2) how your writing is addressing a public audience. So incorporate terms, but do so in a way that is accessible and interesting to a wide range of folks. Also ask yourself: is this publication something I would want to look at? Reconsider how you’re integrating links/media and creating an interactive reading experience. Once you submit your portfolio, I’ll send you a link to the final self-evaluation. In that final self-evaluation you’ll be asked to talk a bit about how you revised and organized your portfolio.

METACOGNITION
Another huge part of the work in this class is self-reflection as it relates to our experiences as consumers, fans, citizens, students, and creators. Throughout the term, we’ll be doing a number of self-evaluations and reflective work that will culminate in a final self-evaluation.

Assessment

I’m generally not into ranking or sorting students, so this course will take different approach to assessment than you’re maybe used to. Concerning both your own work and the things we read, watch, and experience over the course of the term, we will focus on qualitative not quantitative assessment. This means I will not be grading your individual assignments, but rather reacting to them, responding to them, asking questions about them, and suggesting avenues for you to pursue, should you be interested in developing an idea or project. You’ll be doing these things for each other too, as we engage each others’ work as a learning community.

I get that this is new for many folks, so if the process is causing you more anxiety than it alleviates, see me at any point to talk about your progress in the course to date. Additionally, if you are worried about your grade, a solid strategy would be to:

• do the readings and join the discussions in-class
• be engaged and active in our course Slack group
• complete the activations and voice memos each week
• read and annotate your peers’ Medium publications
• make a creative final project that you care about
• revise your work and submit a portfolio
• self-evaluate your work throughout the quarter

Resources and Other Things To Know

MENTAL & PHYSICAL WELL-BEING
If you find yourself struggling with your health, mental well-being, work-life balance, or familial caretaking responsibilities this quarter, please feel free to approach me in ways that you are most comfortable with. I try my best to be flexible and accommodate your unique needs and do not require any disclosure of physical or mental health concerns to help you succeed in my course. For physical health related concerns, click here or call (847) 491–2204 to schedule an appointment. For mental health care related concerns, check out CAPS: Counseling and Psychological Services. They offer short term individual counseling on site, including same day crisis appointments, and are able to connect you to long term therapy options as well. They’re located at Searle Hall, 633 Emerson St, 2nd Floor, and you can call them at (847) 491–2151 to arrange an appointment.

COVID-19
If you’re experiencing any symptoms of COVID, don’t attend class. Update your Symptom Tracker as soon as you can to connect with Northwestern’s Case Management Team for guidance on next steps. Also contact me as soon as possible to arrange to complete coursework. Being members of the campus community, we all need to follow the COVID-19 Code of Conduct this term. This means masking up, staying up to date with current vaccination, testing, Symptom Tracking, and social distancing requirements, and not bringing food into classrooms. If you fail to do these things, I’ll have to ask you to leave the class, and then I’ll have to report the incident to the Office of Community Standards for additional follow-up. Please don’t put your peers at risk and make me do those things. I’ve designed the course so that we can go remote if need be, but here’s to a healthy term :)

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY & HONESTY
I encourage you to borrow ideas from me, from the authors we read, from the things we watch, from your classmates, from the world. In fact, many of the activities and methods of this course are drawn directly from thinkers like bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Jesse Stommel. But you need to cite these ideas where appropriate and make them your own by remixing them, applying them to different contexts, adding a new perspective, and so forth. Northwestern’s policy on academic integrity asks you to (1) be ethical in your treatment of other people’s work and ideas by citing their ideas accurately and fairly and (2) produce new work for each course that is an honest outcome of your own efforts. Please talk to me before turning in any assignment if you are unsure of whether your work meets these standards of academic honesty.

TITLE IX
Faculty at Northwestern University are committed to supporting students and upholding the University’s Policy on Sexual and Gender Based Harassment and other forms of interpersonal violence. Per Title IX, all university employees, myself included, are mandated to report any sexual misconduct that we become aware of. For more information, click here.

BASIC NEEDS SECURITY
Any student who faces challenges securing their food, health, or housing and believes this may affect their learning in this course is urged to contact the Dean of Students. There is a fund specifically designed to support you. And also let me know if you are comfortable doing so, because there may be ways I can help. Check out these local food assistance locations. Also, if you are a student living off campus, you may be eligible for free wifi under this COVID relief program.

ACCESSIBILITY
I’m committed to making this course useful and accessible to the widest possible range of students. I will often need your help to make this commitment a reality. Please talk to me about ways that I can structure the course to suit your own learning needs, whether or not you are registered with disability services. Registering with the AccessibleNU may afford you certain legally-protected accommodations that will be also forwarded to each other instructors. Make sure you submit this request as early as possible each quarter, preferably within the first two weeks of class. All information will remain confidential.