Dr Leslie Haddon STC.S104

This course is available on the MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and Fudan), MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and USC), MSc in Media and Communications, MSc in Media and Communications (Data and Society), MSc in Media and Communications (Research) and MSc in Media, Communication and Development. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

In order to accommodate academic staff research leave and sabbaticals, and in order to maintain smaller seminar group sizes, this course is capped, meaning that there is a limit to the number of students who can be accepted. Whist we do our best to accommodate all requests, we cannot guarantee you a place on this course.

The course aims to explore how information and communication technologies are experienced in everyday life. This includes examining how ICTs are socially shaped, through looking at current theoretical frameworks as well as historical and contemporary examples. The course covers such matters as the domestication of ICTs, their place in social networks and their implications for time and space. Finally, a range of potential social consequences are considered, from the specific implications for parent-child relationships to broader questions about the extent to which these technologies are changing social life.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the MT.

All students are expected to complete advance reading, prepare seminar presentations, and submit one essay of 1,500 words.

Haddon, L. (2004) Information and Communication Technologies in Everyday Life: A Concise Introduction and Research Guide, Berg; Ling, R. (2004) The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society, Morgan Kaufmann; Wellman, B. & Haythornthwaite, C. (Eds) (2002) The Internet in Everyday Life, Oxford University Press; Bakardjieva, M. (2005) Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life, Sage; Katz, J. & Rice, R. (2002) Social Consequences of Internet Use, MIT Press; Berker, T, Hartmann, M., Punie, Y and Ward, K. (Eds) (2005) Domestication of Media and Technologies, Open University Press; Ito, M., Matsuda, M. & Okabe, D. (Eds) (2005) Personal, Portable, Pedestrian, Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, MIT Press; Buckingham D. and R. Willett, Digital Generations (Eds) (2006) Digital Generations: Children, Young People and New Media, Erlbaum; Ito, M. (2010) Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; Van Dijk, J. (2005) The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society, Sage, London; Green, N. and Haddon, L. (2009) Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media, Oxford, Berg.

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the LT.

We are bombarded with claims about how technologies like the internet are changing everyday life - this course provides the tools to evaluate those arguments.

Students' comments

"I really like the way in which each topic was historicised to gain a better understanding of the process."