A more detailed version of this syllabus is available online at http://davis.foulger.net/brooklyn/spring2007/mediacriticism/syllabus.htm .
This course explores critical and theoretical approaches to understanding contemporary media, particularly mass media such as television, radio, and Internet streaming media. We will examine the meanings, pleasures, and practices associated with our production and consumption of media content.
We live in our media. We spend more time engaged in communication than we spend in any other activity, including sleeping, and there are media choices associated with every minute of that communication. In this course, you will learn how to analyze the media and the messages they enable. To do this we need to step back from the way we usually think about media and consider alternate perspectives; we need to learn how to use those perspectives to view, hear, read about, think about, discuss, and write about the media we use and the content we consume from those media.
To do so, we will survey several major methods associated with media theory and criticism. Media theory considers the ways in which, "in the words of Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message"; the ways in which the possibilities, uses, effects, practices associated with media imbue messages with meaning. Various methods of media criticism apply differing theoretical premises to identifying the message of the medium. The critical methods examined in this course include semiotics, narrative theory, genre theory, ideological theories, cultural studies, and media ecology.
This course is designed to help you to think about the media you use to make and consume messages. It will present a variety of of different perspectives on the media within a framework that should complement your production experiences and goals. You will be asking questions, exploring possibilities, and writing intensively (this is a writing intensive course) about difficult and sophisticated ideas, and cultivating skills that are crucial to your development not only as future media makers and storytellers, but also as participants in our evolving media culture.
Your understanding of critical methodologies and ability to analyze mass media content will be assessed through three papers comprehension of reading assignments will be evaluated through three papers which will count for 60% of your course grade. Your ability to write in the style of communication scholarship will be developed in the first two papers, but principally assessed in the third, which is worth 25% of your overall grade. Your understanding of critical methodologies and the "message of the medium" will also be tested in a single essay style exam worth 20% of your grade. Your synthesis of this material with our other class activities will be measured through the instructor's evaluation of your class participation, submission of questions (together worth 10% of your grade), and submission of "think" assignments (worth another 10%).
A class discussion group will be maintained on Blackboard. You can also use this group to exchange of any class-related information or questions, especially those questions you didn’t want to ask in class. Only class members can post to the forum or read messages on the forum. The most general path for accessing CUNY Blackboard is http://portal.cuny.edu. I have provided instructions, including shortcuts) for accessing Blackboard at http://evolutionarymedia.com/student.htm?BlackboardTutorial. Pointers to all of the online material for this class are available both from Blackboard and my Brooklyn student web site: http://davis.foulger.info/brooklyn.