Dr Leslie Haddon

This course is available on the MPhil/PhD in Data, Networks and Society, 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.

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; 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; 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; boyd, d. (2014) It's Complicated.The Social Lives of Networked Teenagers,Yale University Press, New Haven; Byam, N. (2015) Personal Communications in a Digital Age, Cambridge, Polity; Turkle, S. (2011) Alone Together: Why we Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Basic Books, New York; Curran, J., Fenton, N. and Freedman, D. (eds) (2106) Misunderstanding the Internet (Second Edition), Routledge, London.

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."