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Course Description

This course considers a variety of media forms: film, TV, gaming, music, magazines, advertising, and news media. We study pop-culture productions, consumptions, and representations to better understand the importance of the mass media in shaping our identities, choices, and imaginations.

Assessment: Final exam in December exam period (75 pts), social media participation (5 pts), iClicker in-class polls (5 pts), WebCT midterm exam (15 pts).

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, as they are ready,  you can find links to slides from the presentations, weekly required reading lists and lecture outlines, and highlights of the lectures on video.

All 2009 content was removed from the site on May 1st 2010. Look for new content beginning in September 2010.