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Assess the meanings and consequences of new media
New media produced by vast and rapidly expanding creative and commercial industries have become an important part of many everyday activities. Would you like to explore how they are changing our daily practices and cultures?
During the one-year Master’s programme in New Media and Digital Culture, you will delve into the many aspects of what it means to live in an age of new media. Guided by an international team of experienced scholars, you will assist with current research projects and learn to reflect critically on how present-day cultures are shaped by social media, data, games, internet activism, apps, data visualisations, mobile devices, algorithms, and participatory platforms. Read more about our teaching and research environment, including our teaching staff.
The programme explicitly sees new media as present-day manifestations of cultural, social, political, and economic developments that have known similar expressions in different media technologies at different times. This is different from other programmes on new media, which often take a highly disciplinary approach taken from literature/film studies, or have scrapped all references to other fields of media research by focusing solely on the newness of new media. As such, the programme has attracted staff with diverse backgrounds who draw on multidisciplinary perspectives from media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, game studies, philosophy, anthropology, art history, gender studies, and political science.
The programme pivots around three contemporary features of new media technologies and its relationship to culture and society, namely: the mobile/urban aspect, the ludic/games aspect, and the software/data aspect. While the programme highlights the overlaps and synergies between these three aspects we also offer students the opportunity to specialise in a MA profile which relates to these three aspects. Engaging with such a profile means following a set trajectory of courses and a profile-related internship and thesis. An example of such a profile is Media, Data and Society, a co-partnership with the Utrecht Data School.
Active career development
The programme will train you as an independent thinker who is able to critically reflect on contemporary media technologies and their role in cultural production. It will teach you to play a leading role as a constructive thinker, policy advisor, or cultural mediator in the field of New Media and Digital Culture. You will come to possess the tools and vocabularies to investigate and to enlarge our understanding of the many dynamic ways in which new media technologies are embedded within, and reflect on, a changing society.
Both our general programme and its more specific profile trajectories cater to a job market and an industry interested in graduates who are capable of critical engagement with the cultural implications of the complex media culture we live in. To facilitate both in-depth knowledge about new media and digital culture with more practical hands-on experience, you will also complete a research internship towards starting a promising career.
Moderately sized groups of students, individual tutoring, and the chance to participate in international research projects provide you with multiple ways to develop your skills, explore your interests, and achieve valuable academic and personal results. Our dynamic and active community of students, alumni, and scholars provides a wide array of extracurricular activities and access to a large network of practitioners, media artists, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and activists from the most diverse strands of digital culture.
