Image created with Nano Banana
Our Approach to Writing, Literacy and Discourse: Critical Algorithmic Literacy
This course navigates the evolving relationship between writing, literacy, and the structural power of automated systems. Rather than viewing technology as a neutral tool for expression, we will build our Critical Algorithmic Literacy. I define this framework as the ability to move beyond functional use to an interrogation of the socio-ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence and social media algorithms. Throughout the semester, we will investigate how AI is not merely a technical advancement but a structural force that replicates historical biases and reshapes our attention. By decoding the opaque logic of these systems, we situating ourselves as active investigators rather than passive users. Algorithms have become the principle brokers and organizers of information, identity, and relationships. To develop information literacy, we must understand how they instance political and economic power in technical infrastructures
Our semester will focus on two foundational texts that navigate the tension between algorithmic systems and social justice. Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology (2019) examines the “New Jim Code” and the ways in which discriminatory designs are often baked into objective algorithms. We balance this systemic critique with Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2019), which offers meditations on reclaiming our mental focus from the extractive attention economy and resisting the techno-determinism that dictates modern life. Together, these works allow us to interrogate how critical literacy and refusal can be a tool for reclaiming intellectual agency in an automated world.
To ground these theories in the present moment, we will navigate a series of case studies of four major generalist consumer large language model (LLM) chabots: Gemini, Llama, ChatGPT, and Claude. We will critically interrogate the mission statements of Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic to decode the gap between corporate rhetoric and the material realities of algorithms, including the substrate political economy of mining, data centers, and data extraction. By comparing how these companies define their goals to critical interventions into the mythologies of the tech industry, we will examine how language is used to mediate power in the age of automation.
Please use the links below to navigate the course information. Weekly assignments and notes will be added as we go.
1. Course Texts and Reading Schedule
2. Instructor Policies & Course Philosophy
3. University Policies and Resources