SENIOR SEMINAR: DIGITAL CIVIL SOCIETY in Spring 2019 (CM4090)

Civil Society, a mysterious term for any social group that is not the state or the commercial sector, includes NGOs, activists, social movements, family and friend groups, and more. Organized Civil Society groups long have been understood as essential for democracy and social progress. How has the rapid rise of digital media impacted civil society? What constitutes our newly emerging and highly connected “digital civil society?” This course, developed in and also taught at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, considers these questions. While the digital age has expanded the potential for civil society participation, it also brings with it new challenges and threats. The world is increasingly dependent on digital software and infrastructures that are built by private-sector companies and surveilled by government. Our current situation requires new insights into how these digital systems work and how we can safely and ethically engage them for civil society’s purposes. The course explores multiple ways that we can intervene in these issues: legal reform, institutional change, new forms of cultural expression, and through the re-design of our digital tools. What new avenues can we use to help political and associational life flourish using digital media? How might civil society shape digital technologies in turn? The class engages with scholarship, newly designed "activist" tech, and some hands-on workshops to better understand the possibilities and problems of the digital for civil society concerns.