MASTER’S DEGREE PROGRAMME IN INFORMATION STUDIES – THE DIGITAL LIVING TRACK
Aarhus University, Department of Aesthetics & Communication, Faculty of Arts
WORK AND SOCIAL LIFE IN AN ERA OF SMART MACHINES & SOCIAL MEDIA
How do social media influence us? How do digital technologies constrain or liberate social practices, influence communities, or transform organizational and workplace contexts? How do digital technologies shift our understanding of production, conception, commerce, and organizing? This MA focuses on how digital technologies are used in everyday life and offers students the opportunity to consider how we might design better futures by exploring the intersection of networked sociality, organizational practices, and IT design.
This program has multidisciplinary components: Internationally established professors in digital culture studies provide knowledge about the social impact of digital technologies. Computer scientists work with students to develop hands-on knowledge of how digital forms of communication and interaction are designed and programmed. Professors from information studies and media studies help students build a strong grounding in the political, social, and economic structures of 21st Century organizations and institutions. Courses are designed to help students build competencies to engage with and become active citizens and critical consumers in a digitally saturated life.
ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT WHILE YOU STUDY
Course projects allow students to design and build interfaces, engage in empirical studies of digital contexts and explore how new eBusiness models work. These experiences provide practical skills training in development as well as research methods. They also enable the students to understand many of the “behind the scenes” infrastructures that influence the way people utilize these technologies.
DESIGNED TO BUILD SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERTISE
The program aims for candidates to be armed with skills for innovation and a strong understanding of value-creation as well as the complexities of digital technologies in cultural contexts. Graduates should be well-qualified to take jobs in private as well as public sectors that use and want to further develop social media as part of internal or external infrastructures. Candidates could work with teams to develop social media services for citizens, clients, or customers. They could work to incorporate digital media as part of organizational change management. They could conduct research to identify trends that can be used to build more effective market analyses. The successful graduate of this program will also be well-equipped to enter a PhD program in media studies, information studies, communication studies, internet studies, and other disciplines whereby digital media and technologies are studied from multidisciplinary perspectives.
