Professor K. Foot
proffoot@u.washington.edu

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Final Project

Course Description

New Media Criticism considers the nature and forms of new media, their history and development, their effects on audiences and society, and new forms of literacy appropriate to their understanding and use.  Students will learn to recognize, understand, appreciate, evaluate, and use new media.  The term “new media” refers to computerized, digitized media such as web sites, digital video, computer games, and virtual 3-D environments. 

Course Objectives:

• To understand how new media resemble and differ from older media such as photography, analog television, and film
• To develop and apply critical standards for evaluating new media
• To appreciate how new media create illusion and represent space and time
• To understand the logics of new media--how they represent and affect human cognition
• To gain experience in web design and analysis
• To experience and appreciate various forms of new media--hypertext, Flash, digital video, virtual reality

Here are some of the questions that the course will prepare you to answer:

• What features of content and design make a media object accessible and understandable to its audience?
• Where can I find further information that would allow me to determine whether new media content is credible and reliable?
• How can similar messages conveyed in different media forms be compared with each other?
• How does a media message function so as to affect its audience’s point of view?
• What are the implicit assumptions and ideology underlying this message?
• How do various elements of a message--sound, image, sequencing, forms of speech, and narrative--complement or detract from each other?