Mass Media and Society

Catalog description

This media literacy course offers theoretical and practical tools to critically analyze media texts, as well as understand different ways in which audiences interact with them. Students will inquire into how the pervasive mediation of human experience through mass communication channels affects almost every aspect of socialization processes and people's symbolic environment. The interplay between structural constraints conveyed in media's messages and humans' capacity to exercise interpretive agency is addressed through lectures, audiovisual examples, hands-on activities, and a variety of assignments aimed at discerning the elements that intervene in the construction and reception of media texts, beyond their apparent components. This course counts in the social and behavioral sciences core curriculum for non-majors.