Course Description

This course considers a variety of media and genres (including film, TV, gaming, music, magazines, advertising, news media, and online technologies). We study popculture productions, consumptions, and representations in order to better understand the importance of mass media in shaping our identities, choices, and imaginations.

Some of the topics we cover in the first month of the course:

• the branded life: from status goods to masstige, prestige for the masses
• taste cultures: from Tim’s to Starbucks, consumption & identity
• P2P marketing & social media: viral campaigns & Facebook’s social adverts
• gear envy & the bandwagon effect: from iPod halo FX to the cult of the iPhone

On this website you can find links to slides from the presentations, weekly required reading lists and lecture outlines, and highlights of the lectures on video. All of the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.