Cultural Aspects of the Mass Media

Catalog description

The mass media as creators and critics of mass culture in American life; relationships between the media and mass culture. COMM 411 Cultural Aspects of the Mass Media (3) This course examines the mass media as creators and critics of mass culture in American life and the relationship between the media and the mass culture.What are the mass media? What is culture? What are the relationships between mass media and culture? How do mass media help construct the way we live our lives? Do the mass media reflect or condition social reality? How does one study or engage the mass media? Why would you want to anyway? This course is designed to answer some of these questions by promoting a critical understanding of the mass media from historical, social, philosophical, cultural, and economic perspectives. Ultimately, the course will equip students to address these opening questions on their own terms, without simply allowing the mass media to provide their own pictures of how they should be understood. One of the goals of this course is to denaturalize the way people view the mass media-as simply a given, or as pure unmediated reality. Media culture has been and continues to be made. Course materials and lectures will provide several ways of thinking about and studying the conditions of media making and interpretation. Students are encouraged to think as broadly and creatively as possible: to this end, the course will make use of research across a wide range of academic fields such as sociology, history, ethnography, cultural studies, literature, politics, gender studies, economics, art, and philosophy. The course is a communications elective for the Journalism and Telecommunications majors and the Media Studies minor.