Admission Requirements
Bachelor degree (completed)
Description
What have telling stories around the campfire, playing football, dancing on a festival, and spending time on Facebook in common? If we follow our evolutionary lineage back a few million years, we find a social primate that populated parts of the African continent. This primate lived in small-scale communities of around 40-60 individuals, about the same size as the groups formed by present-day chimpanzees and bonobos. Over time, however, our ancestors started living in social environments of ever increasing size and complexity. With groups growing larger, individuals had to spend more time maintaining their social networks and cognitive processing of social information became more demanding. As a consequence, we had to develop bigger and more powerful brains, and find more efficient ways of forming and maintaining social bonds than how most members of the primate family do this: through grooming.
In this research seminar a fascinating, adventurous hypothesis will be worked out: various “inventions” presumed to be characteristic of early human societies, such as the production of art, story-telling, dance, or ritualistic behaviours, can be viewed as social technologies supporting the formation and maintenance of complex social networks. What is the evidence supporting this hypothesis, and what could lead to its rejection? How does it relate to modern media and communication technologies? How can future technological developments affect the deep primate roots of our social structures? And what can the study of social technologies over millions of years teach us about the possibilities and limitations of social life in modern mass-societies?
Through active engagement with scientific literature and hands-on investigation of how people use present-day social (media) technologies, a rich and diverse perspective on this hypothesis will emerge.
Course Objectives
tba
Time Table
The dates are included in the Media Technology calendar
Mode of Instruction
Lectures, self study and seminar
Assessment Method
Contribution to symposium and research project
Blackboard
Reading List
Study materials will be provided by the lecturer during the course
Registration
You have to sign up for courses and exams (including retakes) in uSis.
Please also register for the course in [Blackboard].
Due to limited capacity, non-Media Technology students (external and exchange) can only register after consultation with and approval of the programme coordinator/study advisor (mailto:mediatechnology@leiden.edu).
Contact
Barbara Visscher-van Grinsven, programme coordinator/study advisor for the Media Technology MSc programme (mailto:mediatechnology@leiden.edu).
Remarks
Curriculum link