Media Studies I

Mass media are more integrated than ever before in every aspect of our lives. The academic discipline of media and communication studies, broadly defined, examines the social implications of this integration and looks closely at how media create and disseminate meaning within a wider cultural environment. The focus of the course's first semester will be on analyzing media content: What explicit and implicit messages are embedded within the products of the media machine? How can we interpret and critique these messages? What might these messages tell us about the cultural context that produced them? This course will show how close reading and content analysis can help answer these questions, decoding media texts via semiotics, narrative, genre, representations, ideology, and other areas related to media content.