ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents insights from a case study of undergraduate pedagogy combining critical readings with basic coding skills to develop projects that appropriate, remix, produce, and creatively destroy digital media-or sometimes even repair it. The course, titled "Digital Communication & Practice", is offered in The University of Auckland's Communication major. This chapter concludes with insights from work by students who upended the assignment to "vandalize" by instead repairing media that they found broken. Students are exposed to “distant reading” methods of digital humanities, which use computation as a means to understand literature and other preexisting texts. Social media bots have acquired a nasty reputation, especially for the so-called “armies” of propagandist bots polluting discourse. The Twitter bots were mostly irreverent; even if they algorithmically generated something new from fragments, the bots’ pleasures were usually tied to randomness and destruction.
