Registration ends 07.4.2026 at 23:59 h

The class brings together students from the MA "Media and Digital Cultures" and the MA "Culture and Organization" and is focused on the organizational powers of media technologies. ‘Media organize’, as the architectural theorist Reinhold Martin put it, and this is particularly true for digital media, according to the media theorist John Durham Peters. The class thus focuses on the way media organize, i.e. on their organizational capacities, on the kinds of organizational forms and processes associated with particular media technologies, as well as on the way these media technologies themselves are organized.

The course is broadly split into three parts: in a first part the class explores histories of media technologies of organization; in a second part students embark on a group exercise in which they research particular media technologies and their associated organizational forms and processes; and in a third part the class explores current instantiations of media technologies of organization in writing about them.

The aim of the class is to acquaint students with the media and organization theories that take the interplay of media technologies and organization seriously, provide a brief historical overview of this relationship, and provide an insight into how media technologies and organization interplay today. Students will be equipped with some basic methodological skills in doing (media-)historical and qualitative empirical research on media technologies and organization, with the aim of acquiring analytical skills allowing students to explore the interplay of media technologies and organization in their variegated ways.

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