Digicorp

Digicorp – USP (University of Sao Paulo)

Digicorp is a graduate program at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, aimed at digital communication professionals (marketing, business, journalism, advertising) interested in marrying theory and practice. It supposedly places students in contact with strategic planning, economics of information, management of social networks, web project creation, hypermedia narrative and design, among others.

It lasts 460 hours (20 months), out of which 360 hours are named “presential classes” (as in physically present in the classroom, yet is one not present when online?), 60 hours of reading and 40 hours of development and defending a thesis.

Some of the courses include “The Ethics of Interaction”, “Digital Marketing”, “Semiotics of the Brand”, “Audiovisual Narratives for Mobile Devices”, “Data Architecture and Usability” and “Thesis Project”.

It seems antithetical that the program would amount to a conventional thesis project (they use the word “monografia”, which doesn’t leave room for anything other than traditional written theses). Also worth noting is the the list of books candidates must be familiar with, all of which are by Brazilian authors. Yet one of the requirements for admission is fluency in English. Which brings about another layer of “literacy” for non-English speaking countries. It is interesting to consider how “illiterate” a native of a country in the developing world “always already” is in technological contexts. One is born into a kind of literal, cultural, social and symbolic illiteracy and has to play “catch up” in order to be on a level that may be almost inherent or osmotically acquired by citizens in richer, English-speaking countries. If we think of Derrida's work "Monolingualism" and, of course, Lacan, it is easy to see how the web of complications between subjectivity and language (whether it be Portuguese, English or HTML) may grow even more intricate for those who start off not at "zero" but at "minus three." Even before the Internet, the consumption of, for example, cinema in many of these "foreign" countries was always a subtitled one. How may this consumption of media products whose provenance always lies elsewhere (geographically, linguistically, symbolically) "pit" citizens of the developing world against everyone else? And what about France in all this?

Blog post/Advertisement/Press Release for Digicorp.