Do you know what you’re watching? What you’re reading? You might think that what comes across your television or web browser, in your newspaper or magazine, or on your movie screen is pretty much the whole message; what you see is what you get. But the content we see, read, and hear is the product of complex forces − economic, governmental, historical, and technological.
Please note: this legacy course does not offer a certificate and may contain broken links and outdated information. Although archived, it is open for learning without registration or enrollment.
This course will explore those underlying forces and provide analytical tools to evaluate media critically. An overall goal is to become media literate, to gain an understanding of mass media as cultural industries that seek to influence our behavior and affect our values as a society. Unit 1 aims to define mass communication, mass media, and culture. It also will introduce the core concepts of media literacy and the concept of transmedia, the practice of integrating entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. Unit 2 will introduce selected theories that will help in analyzing mass communication and its effects. Subsequent units will explore individual mediums: books, newspapers, magazines, music and radio, film, television, the Internet and social media, and electronic games and virtual worlds. The last unit will discuss issues of media ethics and the relationship of media to government.
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
- describe how mass communication industries operate as businesses, and summarize the historical, technological, legal, and economic forces affecting them;
- differentiate among various mass media, but also describe how the various media are interconnected and how this affects the cultural texts they create;
- explain the concepts of convergence and transmedia using examples from media today;
- summarize major theories used to study mass communication and apply them as a media-literate person; and
- analyze mass communication in the 21st century as a cultural enterprise, as the product of mass communication companies is culture.
