This Mediated Life: How Media Narratives Make Us Who We Are

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary seminar will investigate how mass media not only provides us with entertainment and distraction but is crucial in constructing and maintaining our identities. Contemporary mass media forms, both legacy and emergent, reflect anxieties and fears, aspirations and hopes while also providing a means by which we navigate an increasingly complex and divisive social and political landscape. Utilizing wide ranging critical and theoretical methodologies, students will consider how media turns fact and fiction, reality and experience into compelling stories through which we find our place in the world. The course will explore questions such as: How do mass media provide narratives that delineate and naturalize prevailing ideologies? How do such narratives alternately form our sense of politics, economics, race, gender, sexuality and citizenship? Can media provide a means to challenge cultural and political hegemony through construction and distribution of narratives which provide alternatives to such structures? Readings will be drawn from Berger's Media Analysis Techniques as well as the anthologies The Media Studies Reader and Gender, Race and Class in the Media and screenings will include excerpts from films The Dark Knight Rises, The Secret, The Truman Show, Network, The Social Network and Quiz Show, television shows Ways of Seeing, The Daily Show, The Simpsons and The X-Files, among others, as well as a selection of other media forms, including advertisements, blogs, podcasts, magazines, music videos, and social media sites.