About This Course

This course examines how we come to understand ourselves and our world, and learn to feel, judge, and act, through the simulative mediation of personal and mass communication technologies. The aim is to provide students with a deeper understanding of the highly commodified symbolic environment that surrounds them and in which they participate as audience and, increasingly, producer. Although the focus is psychological, the history, sociology, political economy, and technology of various media will be discussed in relation to the changing forms of public and private life in the 21st century. This is not a seminar course.