Module Directory

This module explores how diverse technologies disrupt and, in some cases, distort traditional patterns of human flourishing. Online shopping, mobile phones, streaming technologies, social media, chatbots, digital health trackers, LLMs—it’s no exaggeration to claim that these technologies have fundamentally reshaped core dimensions of human life. They transform how we relate to others, how we think of ourselves, how we understand what counts as knowledge, our sense of meaning, as well as our perceptive, emotional, imaginative, and creative engagement with the world. This module reflects on how these transformative technologies help or hinder human flourishing and what we might do to enhance their benefits and mitigate their harms. Participants will develop critical frameworks for analysing technological advances from diverse standpoints including but not limited to public policy, design, psychology, and philosophy. The course equips students to assess technological change with nuance, balancing reasonable optimism with critical scepticism.

The aims of this module are:

• To introduce students to key topics in the Digital Humanities.


• To enable students to systematically identify and critically examine problems that arise through the widespread dissemination of new powerful technologies.


• To enable students to appreciate the different ways diverse academic disciplines can shed light on and inform our evaluation of the impact of disruptive technologies on human flourishing.


• To give students tools to start formulating possible responses to the challenges identified in the module and to identify new challenges that have so far been neglected.

By the end of this module students are expected to be able to:

1. Write essays that clearly identify and explain the challenges new technologies pose to human flourishing and engage with the arguments concerning these challenges that they encounter in the course readings.


2. Critically evaluate these challenges and arguments.


3. Understand and critically assess the practical implications of such strategies and positions, and their impact on on-going public debates and conflicts.


4. Formulate academically supported opinions and suggest solutions to the complex challenges posed by new disruptive technologies.

Transferable skills:

By the end of the module, students should also have acquired a set of transferable skills, and in particular be able to:

5. identify and process diverse (and sometimes conflicting) arguments and empirical studies;


6. compare and evaluate different arguments and assess the limitations of their own position or methods;


7. write and present verbally a precise account of strategies, arguments, and their presuppositions and implications;


8. be sensitive to the positions of others and communicate their own views in ways that are coherent and rigorous and accessible to them.

Topics to be covered may include:

• Attention economies and the fragmentation of focus


• Habit formation, addiction, and persuasive design


• Identity formation in digitally mediated environments


• Mental health and digital life


• Friendship, intimacy, and dating in the app era


• Online communities vs. social isolation


• Family life and childhood in a screen-saturated world


• Algorithmic curation and epistemic bubbles


• Misinformation, deepfakes, and trust


• Metrics, performance, and the quantified self


• Technology, leisure, and the good life


• Creativity in the age of generative AI


• Surveillance, privacy, and data ownership


• Automation, dignity, and the future of work


• Ethical design and humane technology


• Public policy responses to technological disruption


• Human enhancement and transhumanism


• AI companionship and artificial sociality


• Virtual worlds and embodied experience


• “Flourishing-centred” technology

This module will be delivered via:

• One 2-hour seminar per week

Students are expected to undertake the reading before classes and be prepared to engage in discussion.

This module has a reading week.