The course focuses on the discourse about and above digital media and culture. Like many previous technologies, digital media are portrayed simultaneously as good and bad for their users - invoking hope for social change and utopia as well as fear of disintegration, hollowing out and apocalyptic dystopia. both threat and hope are a result of digital media's ability to blur various conventional boundaries. The course will walk along some of those boundaries, equipping students with reflective tools to evaluate their digital and online practices beyond the simplicity of good or bad. This in an introduction level course that engages some of the key questions marks digital media raises on issues such as identity, community, relationships, authority, culture and language: what is the meaning of disembodied identity and faceless conversation? Are crowds wise or conservative and dangerous (and what happens when they need to cooperate in online peer production)? Is being online a leisure activity or a kind of work? Is privacy dead or simply changing? etc.