Seminar on Global Culture and Communication

Catalog description

This course explores the globalization of communication and communication technologies within a broad political, economic and cultural context. COMMS 560 Seminar on Global Culture and Communication (3) Developments in technology have led to new levels of interaction and interdependency of human groups and processes across the boundaries that historically separated them - geography, national identity, state borders, and local community. In such a context, we must re-examine many of our assumptions about space, place, identity, and belonging, and about human social organization and human agency - the potential to purposefully transform ourselves and our surroundings. Globalization calls into question our assumptions about politics, economics, culture, and communication. In this course, students will consider the challenges and opportunities that globalization creates for human community and agency - that is, for the multiple ways in which human activity becomes socially organized and purposeful. They will survey the dominant theories of globalization and regionalization and examine the current trends in regionalization and globalization of politics, culture, communication, economic processes, and regulatory structures. They will focus on the challenges communication globalization poses to past forms of identity, the transformation of traditional understandings of space and place, and the opportunities for new forms of identity, community, and action.