Web 101 Course Pack

September 18, 2011 1:37 PM

Internet as visual medium - Intro texts for college level?

Asking for a friend.

She's teaching a generalist course at college level that's an intro to visual media. She has film, visual arts and photography covered, but needs some ideas for an engaging text about the Web as a visual medium. I guess super esoteric is not good, but challenging is good.

Thanks hivemind!

posted by TheGoodBlood to media & arts (4 answers total)

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is not an academic text, but it is reasonably articulate about how being a visual medium actually matters for the web. I can't tell quite what you're looking for though: media studies, graphic design texts (practical or theoretical), an intro to web standards, typography, etc. I chose Krug because it's sort of in-between all of those.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 3:16 PM on September 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the suggestion.

I know, I'm not so sure either, and sorry, I should've be more clear.

They're first year communications students mostly directly from high school and the course is supposed to give them an intro to what "visual culture" is, I guess. The way she's approaching this is separating by broad media types (thus, photo, visual arts, cinema, etc) and choosing one interesting text and one interesting example of that medium to be discussed in class. Nothing technical, more history and ideas.

So, yeah, media studies is the broad category.

Also, I should have mentioned, articles or chapters of books, not whole books.
posted by TheGoodBlood at 3:56 PM on September 18, 2011

When I TA'd a course like this, we assigned The Language of New Media. Not terribly esoteric, but it is a bit dated (2001, I think). Convergence Culture is more recent -- it doesn't specifically focus on the web, but more broadly on digital culture, and the chapters are good stand-alone reads.

Your friend might also look at stuff in The New Media Reader.
posted by ann_disaster at 4:27 PM on September 18, 2011

In that case, I'll add the free online video-book Learning from Youtube and the slideshow the creative Internet for some interesting (though not 100% web) examples to talk about. A couple of chapters from Don't Make Me Think would still be very appropriate for freshman communication majors.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:12 AM on September 19, 2011