USE2323: CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

Group Project Description and Instructions

THIS PROJECT CARRIES 20% OF YOUR COURSE GRADE. THE GRADE AWARDED
TO THE PROJECT WILL BE DIVIDED EVENLY AMONG THE MEMBERS OF EACH
GROUP

1. What is it?

The class will be divided into 5 groups consisting of 5-7 members each. The groups will be
mainly formed the table that you seat yourself at. During the second half of the semester, each
group is responsible for producing the concept surrounding a work of science or speculative
fiction. This fiction can be in any form: a feature film, a novel, a TV programme, or a staged
production. Whatever the form, the story that is being created needs to revolve substantially
around a specific technological item that currently does not exist in the real world, and the
setting needs to be in a world that also does not exist. There are several considerations for this
story:

• You can set your story in an imagined future;

• The setting can also be fantasy-oriented: an historically removed world that is set in
what looks like the past but also very different from the real past (think, for instance,
Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones);
• Or it can be set in a contemporaneous but alternate/parallel universe, so some aspects
of our world can be found there but there are also some noticeable differences.

Essentially, the main task with this project is to develop three aspects of the story. First, the
“world” that the story is set in. Second, the technology item that serves as a driving element of
the story. Third, the story itself: who are the characters, what happens to them, how are they
affected by changed circumstances, and what must they do to resolve the plot. However, the
project only requires you to produce the concept only. You don’t need to have a fully
developed story; just a good sense of the story’s basics: a sense of the world that the story
takes place, who the main characters are, what happens that disrupts the status quo (where
does the technology item fit in this disruption?), what the characters must do, and what
happens ultimately in the end.

2. Establishing the background of the text

While your team is developing the film, novel, TV programme, etc., one thing you must not lose
sight of is the textuality of your work. Ultimately, it is still a text that is produced by someone, in
a particular place, at a particular point in time, and with an intention that is both conscious and
unconscious. This means that you will first need to establish when the text is produced. I
suggest that this should be the present (the late 2010s). The other aspects can be things that
you create, such as the author, director, playwright, or screenwriter, and what special
circumstances you establish that has led the writer to produce the text. What place the writer
writes from, such as a city or country, may be important as well, as is the objective of the text.

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For instance, you can imagine the author feeling worried that certain real-world technologies
may be displacing humanity and as a result decided to create this piece of speculative fiction
as a way of metaphorically communicating those anxieties. Or it is also possible that the author
may not be fully conscious of those anxieties, in which case, you must explain why.

3. Analysis

Apart from the two tasks of developing the concept of your work of fiction, establishing the
background and context of the text, there is one last requirement of the project, which is to
now perform your own analysis of it. If what your group has produced is a really existing text,
how would you go about performing a cultural reading of it? For instance, when we encounter
a piece of fiction, we normally ask questions about it. What message does the text try to send?
How does it do so? How aware is the text of the context? Let me offer you a real example.

Many of you will be familiar with the premise of Star Wars especially The New Hope and Rogue
One. Both of these films revolve are set around the same period of time in the Star Wars
universe when the rebels discover that the Empire has created the ultimate weapon, the Death
Star. In these texts, the technological disruptor is this weapon. While not much information is
offered about how this technology works, the films do show how destructive the weapon is,
and what this could ultimately mean for the rebellion, and why the films are driven by the story
of the protagonists’ attempts to obtain the technical details of the Death Star and to convey
them to experts where they can be dissected and flaws of the weapons be uncovered.
Reading The New Hope in the context of the Cold War 1970s, we can see how US-Soviet
tensions are culturally articulated, particularly showing American anxieties of nuclear
exterminism and perceptions that the USSR is more brutal with their weapons technology and
certainly less restrained in its use than the US sees itself to be. Hence, one reading is the
attempt to form a contrast between the US as a responsible steward of technology, while the
USSR as the opposite. In the case of this film, it is also possible to say that the writer does not
need to be fully conscious that this is message he is sending, but has ended up doing so
because of his entrenchment in the unseen ideologies of American society.

Given this example, your task is to do a similar reading. In order to do so, you can recall some
of the themes we have spoken in class: modernity and progress, capitalism, identity, gender,
and the body. It is also possible to bring in themes that we haven’t but could have discussed.
So, the story you’ve created and the circumstances could be read as a reaction to patriarchal
control over technology, or it could be a criticism of why in recent times technology and
capitalism can no longer be separated and ends up enslaving or alienating workers. Whatever
the case might be, apart from identifying a way to analyse your text, you should also focus on
how and why technological culture is central to the analysis and to try to bring in some
secondary sources in support.

4. Purpose of this assignment

As you should be aware by now, this module’s emphasis on technological culture means that
we need to look far beyond the “usual” places to find sources that tell us how culture and

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society react to technology or how technology is produced as a result of cultural and social
factors. One of the things that we have been doing constantly in class is to look at fictional
sources because they act as powerful repositories of public perceptions of technology and
along with that contain the oftentimes unseen and unconscious ideologies that shape those
perceptions. When we critically or culturally read a text, we are not just simply allowing the texts
to entertain us, but uncovering how perceptions and ideologies function in the text and what
they have to say about the people who produce and consume those texts. For this project, we
are taking things one step further. Instead of just critically reading a text, we are synthetically
creating one, together with the context and authorship. This means that you have the ability to
construct some of these conditions. For example, when you think of authorship you can decide
if the author is going to be someone who is very self-reflexive about what he or she is doing, or
it could be someone who isn’t, or it could be just an author who writes just to present a story
made up of visceral thrills. So, in creating the text, authorship, and context, you are then able to
create any contextual condition to your liking and subject those conditions specifically to the
kind of analysis you want to perform. In brief, think of this project as another way of exercising
your skills in critiquing the relationship between technology and culture.

5. Presentation

Each group is responsible for putting together a project presentation that is 20 minutes long
and will be presented in class during the meeting in week 12. In addition, there will be another
10 minutes allocated to discussion after each presentation.

The format, style, and method of the presentation is entirely up to you. At the very least, the
presentation needs to cover the three broad areas of the project: the concept of the text, the
presentation of the context (how you establish the background, the author, etc.), and your
analysis (if you were a critic now tasked to culturally read the text). Of course, effective
presentations always make use of different implements to help convey the content. A
presentation that is simply oral in nature will not be enough. For instance, you may want to
think about what kind of visual aids to use to help present the concept of the fiction to your
audience. Would it be cover art? An imaginary prop? Sample storyboards? A possible
paragraph from the novel? And what medium will you use to present those visual aids?
PowerPoint? Easel board?

6. Grading criteria

Grading of the project will be determined by (in that order):

1. The effectiveness of the presentation

2. The overall credibility of the text/site: how credible is it in relation to the historical
context and the profile of the creator(s)?
3. The project group’s awareness of the social, historical, cultural, or political
circumstances affecting the text/site; and how your group performs an external critique
of it.
4. Aesthetic quality.